Interactions between Service Recovery Efforts and Customer Characteristics: Apology, Compensation, and Empowerment

This study examines the effects of customer characteristics (i.e., number of visits and complaint tendencies) on recovery efforts. Sixteen scenario-based types of service-recovery strategies (i.e., 4 types of compensation x 2 types of apology x 2 conditions of empowerment) along with a given service failure (i.e., foreign items in food) were provided to 774 participants recruited from nationwide online panels in the U.S. The results reveal that one-time compensation at the point of incident, cue-based apologies, and empowered servers are the most effective service-recovery strategies. It also reveals that active complainers tend to recommend the restaurant after service recovery actions, whereas passive complainers tend to have better distributive fairness and interactional fairness after service recovery actions. These research findings are expected to establish more appropriate service-recovery strategies manuals.