The Importance Of Service Recovery

A service failure can be defined as a service delivery performance that does not meet the expectations of the customer that in turn gives rise to customer dissatisfaction. Because of the intangible and heterogeneous nature of services that essentially involves the service provider and often times the customer in the process of delivering the service, it is quite difficult to always deliver a faultless service. This leads to the quality of service delivered being inadequate and deficient which can be termed as service failure (Lovelock and Quelch, 1983). Service failure is quite common across all types of service industries and across all mediums and distribution channels.

2.2. Service recovery Service recovery refers to the actions that the organization or the service provider would take in order to respond to the service failure such that the problem of the concerned customer is resolved (Gronroos, 1988). Service recovery can also be viewed as a bundle of resources which a service firm can use in response to the service failure (Smith, Bolton and Wagner, 1999). Managing service recovery effectively is very important as it has been shown to impact customer evaluations very strongly. It has been shown that customers evaluate service recovery more closely than first time service

B2C ecommerce sales in 2013 grew 23% to exceed $1.2 trillion with China and Indonesia growing at 65% and 71% respectively. Customers in Asia-Pacific region are expected to spend the highest amount online among all regions in the next few years (www.emarketer.com). In today’s fast growing digital economy, more and more customers all over the world are doing their shopping online. The service issues and its resolution in this online low-contact medium is quite different from offline high contact/ face-to-face service medium (Holloway & Beatty,