Abstract
Owing to the human nature of service delivery service failures occasionally occur. Persistently poor service delivery will, however, have a harmful impact on the survival and growth prospects of service firms. Service failure thus calls for remedial action, better known as service recovery. A variety of remedies have been proposed over the years. These remedies or tactics include fixing the problem, apologising, compensation (financial compensation or other forms of redress), a timely response and offering an explanation. A general theme in the service recovery literature is that ‘more is better’. The validity of this contention has, however, not been adequately considered. In other words, in a service recovery context, is more always better? Can service recovery be over-done (known as ‘over-benefitting’)? If so, what are the consequences? Based on the results of two field-type experimental studies involving a sample of 12 800 respondents the conclusion is that over-benefitting can be counter-productive. Over-benefitting consistently produced satisfaction scores lower than service recovery that was more moderate in nature.
Highlights
Service recovery has consistently been identified as one of the most under-researched areas of services marketing (Brown, Fisk & Bitner, 1994). Webster and Sundaram (1998: 153) lamented: “Our limited knowledge regarding service failure recovery is unfortunate”
In other words, increasing levels of overbenefitting has a negative in influence of satisfaction with service recovery. Based on this analysis we can conclude that the option of no service recovery action/remedy consistently yielded the lowest satisfaction with service recovery’ (SSR) scores and should from a managerial perspective, not be considered
Failure to respond satisfactorily to service complaints will lead to dissatisfaction and undesirable outcomes such as negative word-of mouth and lost sales
Summary
Service recovery has consistently been identified as one of the most under-researched areas of services marketing (Brown, Fisk & Bitner, 1994). Webster and Sundaram (1998: 153) lamented: “Our limited knowledge regarding service failure recovery is unfortunate”. One common theme in the service management literature is that once service failure occurs, a firm should initiate some attempt to recover the situation to avoid the negative impact of word-of-mouth, loss of sales and market share loss. A variety of remedies have been proposed over the years. These include fixing the problem, apologising, providing compensation (financial compensation or other forms of redress), a timely response and offering an explanation (Boshoff, 1997). Service staff are encouraged to do ‘whatever it takes’ to fix the problem. The validity of this type of approach to service recovery has not been critically considered
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