Consumer complaints and recovery through guaranteeing self‐service technology

Abstract

ABSTRACTSelf‐service technologies are shaping the future of consumer behaviour, yet consumers often experience service failure in this context. This conceptual paper focuses on self‐service technology failure and recovery. A consumer perspective is taken. Recovering from self‐service technology failure is fraught with difficulty, mainly because of the absence of service personnel. The aim of this paper is to present a theoretical framework and associated research propositions in respect to the positive role that service guarantees can play in the context of self‐service technology failure and recovery. It contributes to the consumer behaviour domain by unifying the theory pertaining to consumer complaint behaviour, service recovery, specifically consumers' perceptions of justice, and service guarantees, which are set in a distinctive self‐service technology context. It is advanced that service guarantees, specifically multiple attribute‐specific guarantees, are associated with consumer voice complaints following self‐service technology failure, which is contingent on the attribution of blame in the light of consumers' production role. Service guarantees are argued to be associated with consumers' perceptions of just recovery in the self‐service technology context when they promise to fix the problem, compensate only when the problem cannot be remedied, offer a choice of compensation that is contingent on failure severity, afford ease of invocation and collection, and provide a personalised response to failures. Previous classifications of SSTs are used to highlight the applicability of guarantees for different types of SSTs. Managerial implications based on the theoretical framework are presented, along with future research directions. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.