A service failure happened: Does your Service recovery create customer forgiveness and post-trust?

Service failure occurs when service experiences do not align with consumer expectations. This incongruence can stimulate feelings of betrayal, with consumer responses to service failure ranging from switching provider and sharing negative word-of-mouth through to engaging in revenge behaviours detrimental to the reputation and/or profitability of the ‘offending’ firm.

Dr Roya Rahimi and her colleagues in their recent research using coping theory, investigated the extent to which service recovery strategies (e.g., firm-level apologies; compensation; feedback loops) stimulate customer forgiveness and post-trust following service failure. Based on a two-stage explanatory sequential mixed-method within an Iranian food delivery platform and using 925 responses, they found out that the role of recovery strategies in stimulating forgiveness and post-trust following service failure. The study furfur using 45 interviews suggested that proactive, open, and immediate recovery protocol enactment holds greatest value in avoiding negative consumer responses to service failure, mitigating negative outcomes (e.g., anger, frustration).

These findings expand extant understanding of food service platform consumption behaviours, providing valuable practical insight for industry stakeholders with regards to the nuances of service failure and recovery in the digital age.

Read the full paper here:

Investigating the effects of service recovery strategies on consumer forgiveness and post-trust in the food delivery sector (openrepository.com)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0278431922002079