Abstract
Since service failure is inevitable in the service industry, how to remedy the failure and maintain customer satisfaction has become an important management issue for enterprises in marketing. This study took gender and physical attractiveness as moderators, hoping to find a mechanism that is more conducive to improving the effectiveness of failure recovery from the perspective of these two variables. In this study, experimental design was used to design a total of 16 experimental scenarios for model verification. The experiment was conducted on a network platform, and a total of 800 valid experimental samples were completed. The study found that for tangible compensation, female service personnel and physical attractiveness are helpful to improve post-recovery satisfaction. In addition, the opposite sex combination of customers and service personnel will produce better remedial effect than the heterosexual combination. Finally, it is also verified that physical attractiveness is an important moderator. The physical attractiveness of the service personnel enables the recovery type and gender combination to have more positive influence on post-recovery satisfaction, thus it plays an important role in failure recovery strategy. Managerial implications for marketing manager of the service industry as well as directions for future research are also discussed.
Highlights
According to the well-known marketing law of "the cost of attracting new customers is five times as much as maintaining existing customers", it can be seen that reaching customer satisfaction and maintaining long-term customer relationships are one of the most important cost-saving strategies for enterprises (Kotler et al, 2018)
This study argues that if service recovery is provided by female service personnel, customers would be better satisfied than when serviced by male personnel
This paper presents the following hypotheses: H5: In terms of gender, female service personnel have a stronger influence on the phenomenon that tangible compensation has a more significant effect on post-recovery satisfaction (PRS) than psychological compensation
Summary
According to the well-known marketing law of "the cost of attracting new customers is five times as much as maintaining existing customers", it can be seen that reaching customer satisfaction and maintaining long-term customer relationships are one of the most important cost-saving strategies for enterprises (Kotler et al, 2018). Due to rising consumer awareness, coupled with the convenient and diversified channels to reflect complaints and vent grievances, if enterprises fail to deal with service failures in a timely and effective manner, they may lose customers, it may cause damage to the corporate image or other areas due to the spread of negative word-of-mouth (WOM) (Smith et al, 1999; Tsao, 2018). Service recovery has been discussed by a large number of studies in the past, which included various industries, such as banking, restaurants, car repair, travel agencies, aviation and hotels (Maxham III & Netemeyer, 2002; Grégoire & Fisher, 2008; Goodwin & Ross, 1992; Tsao, 2018), most of which are based on the equity theory. Compared with the above industries, the food and beverage (F&B) industry has found that http://ibr.ccsenet.org
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