Rectifying Failure of Service: How Customer Perceptions of Justice Affect Their Emotional Response and Social Media Testimonial

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine how perceived justice affects a customer’s emotional response during the process of rectifying a service failure and the effect of that response to word-of-mouth recommendations posted on social media. Specifically, this study develops and tests a theoretical model which connects service recovery encounters in restaurants (justice and emotion), incidents of sharing opinions in social networks (electronic world-of-mouth), and re-patronage intention. A survey queried customers who had a service recovery experience at a casual dining restaurant and also were social media users. The survey produced 811 valid responses. Confirmatory factor analysis and the structural equation modeling tested the proposed model and research hypotheses. The findings of the study reveal that perceived justice affects customers’ loyalty (e-WOM and re-patronage intention) through emotions generated during the recovery from a failure in service. Among the three justice attributes (distributive, procedural and interactional), only distributive justice showed an impact on emotions during service recovery encounters. The study provides a foundation for future hospitality research investigating social media as a communicative tool for service recovery, and suggests strategies for the industry’s practitioners. This research contributes to the literature of emotional response and social media in the service recovery process by linking restaurants’ service and customers’ perceptions toward justice, emotion, opinions on social media.