An exploration into the practice of online service failure and recovery strategies in the Balkans

To help managers better balance online service failures and recovery strategies, organisations are increasingly offering a variety of recovery programmes. Anecdotal reports suggest that organisations are experimenting with various recovery strategies, and particularly transitioning offline recovery strategies into the emerging technological tapestries. Drawing on data collected from two Balkan countries (Kosovo and Albania) with varying service failures, recovery strategies and levels of participation in online environments, this study examines how interactions between the customer and provider impact on recovery strategies. Unlike existing studies regarding online service failure and recovery strategies, we argue that rather than examining the subconscious of the customer as a stand-alone explanation for failure-recovery perceptions, interactions with the provider must also be taken into account. The current study extends the related construct of failure-recovery perceptions and it suggests that service failure generates different recovery strategies based on the contextual social world.

[1]  Kenneth R. Evans,et al.  The effects of customer participation in co-created service recovery , 2008 .

[2]  Wilson Ozuem,et al.  The influence of customer loyalty on small island economies: an empirical and exploratory study , 2016 .

[3]  James G. Maxham,et al.  A Longitudinal Study of Complaining Customers' Evaluations of Multiple Service Failures and Recovery Efforts , 2002 .

[4]  P. Rauschnabel,et al.  Elements of strategic social media marketing: A holistic framework , 2017 .

[5]  Emily H.T. Yapp,et al.  The Key Dimensions of Online Service Quality: A Study of Consumer Perceptions , 2014 .

[6]  Seyed Shahin Sharifi,et al.  Discount reference moderates customers' reactions to discount frames after online service failure , 2016 .

[7]  Jaywant Singh,et al.  Service failures in e-retailing: Examining the effects of response time, compensation, and service criticality , 2017, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[8]  Darren W. Dahl,et al.  The Benefit of Becoming Friends: Complaining after Service Failures Leads Customers with Strong Ties to Increase Loyalty , 2017 .

[9]  K. Howell.  Paradigm of Inquiry: Critical Theory and Constructivism , 2016 .

[10]  James A. Holstein,et al.  Handbook of constructionist research , 2009, QMiP Bulletin.

[11]  Tracy Jun-Feng Zhang,et al.  The Roles of Justice and Customer Satisfaction in Customer Retention: A Lesson from Service Recovery , 2013 .

[12]  A. Pang,et al.  Negotiating crisis in the social media environment: Evolution of crises online, gaining credibility offline , 2014 .

[13]  Adamantios Diamantopoulos,et al.  A Typology of Consumers' Emotional Response Styles During Service Recovery Encounters , 2009 .

[14]  Carla Ruiz-Mafe,et al.  The role of emotions and conflicting online reviews on consumers' purchase intentions , 2018, Journal of Business Research.

[15]  Stephen J. Hoch,et al.  Managing What Consumers Learn from Experience , 1989 .

[16]  R. Pieters,et al.  Angry customers don't come back, they get back: The experience and behavioral implications of anger and dissatisfaction in services , 2003 .

[17]  Fenio Annansingh,et al.  Knowledge generation and sharing in UK universities: A tale of two cultures? , 2013, Int. J. Inf. Manag..

[18]  Glenn L. Christensen,et al.  A Cultural Models Approach to Service Recovery , 2007 .

[19]  Catherine A. Cole,et al.  Better him than me: social comparison theory and service recovery , 2008 .

[20]  Donald Bobiash.  Country Context: , 2019, Unity and Reconciliation in Rwanda.

[21]  K. Howell.  An Introduction to the Philosophy of Methodology , 2012 .

[22]  N. Denzin,et al.  The discipline and practice of qualitative research [Introduction]. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed. , 2000 .

[23]  James F. Devlin,et al.  Is high recovery more effective than expected recovery in addressing service failure? — A moral judgment perspective , 2018 .

[24]  S. Beatty,et al.  Service Failure in Online Retailing , 2003 .

[25]  Alex S. L. Tsang,et al.  Group Service Recovery Strategies Effectiveness: The Moderating Effects of Group Size and Relational Distance , 2014 .

[26]  Niall Piercy,et al.  Online service failure and propensity to suspend offline consumption , 2014 .

[27]  Rodolfo Vázquez-Casielles,et al.  Satisfaction with service recovery: Perceived justice and emotional responses , 2009 .

[28]  E. Guba,et al.  Competing paradigms in qualitative research. , 1994 .

[29]  S. Wilkinson.  Focus groups in feminist research , 1998 .

[30]  T. Diefenbach.  Are case studies more than sophisticated storytelling?: Methodological problems of qualitative empirical research mainly based on semi-structured interviews , 2009 .

[31]  Park Thaichon,et al.  From connoisseur luxury to mass luxury: value co-creation and co-destruction in the online environment , 2017 .

[32]  Daniel A. Gruber,et al.  The real-time power of Twitter: Crisis management and leadership in an age of social media , 2015 .

[33]  M. Pitman.  Qualitative Research Design: An Interactive Approach , 1998 .

[34]  Hsin-Hui Lin,et al.  The relationship of service failure severity, service recovery justice and perceived switching costs with customer loyalty in the context of e-tailing , 2011, Int. J. Inf. Manag..

[35]  Patrick Barwise,et al.  The One Thing You Must Get Right When Building a Brand , 2010 .

[36]  Wilson Ozuem,et al.  Developing technologically induced environments: the case of the Nigerian banking sector , 2018 .

[37]  Kumar Rakesh Ranjan,et al.  An examination of the emotions that follow a failure of co-creation , 2017 .

[38]  Petra Theunissen,et al.  Reputations at risk: Engagement during social media crises , 2015 .

[39]  Amisha M. Patel,et al.  An Exploration of Consumers' Response to Online Service Recovery Initiatives , 2017 .

[40]  M. Balaji,et al.  Are cynical customers satisfied differently? Role of negative inferred motive and customer participation in service recovery , 2018 .

[41]  Bruno S. Silvestre,et al.  Social Media? Get Serious! Understanding the Functional Building Blocks of Social Media , 2011 .

[42]  T. Malefyt.  Relationship advertising: How advertising can enhance social bonds , 2015 .

[43]  Wolfgang Weitzl,et al.  The effects of marketer- and advocate-initiated online service recovery responses on silent bystanders , 2017 .

[44]  Kevin G. Corley,et al.  Seeking Qualitative Rigor in Inductive Research , 2013 .

[45]  Beomjoon Choi,et al.  The effects of perceived service recovery justice on customer affection, loyalty, and word-of-mouth , 2014 .

[46]  Lukas P. Forbes,et al.  Typologies of e‐commerce retail failures and recovery strategies , 2005 .

[47]  Sunmee Choi,et al.  Perceived controllability and service expectations: Influences on customer reactions following service failure , 2008 .

[48]  A. Parry.  Handbook of Qualitative Research , 2002 .

[49]  Jochen Wirtz,et al.  Consumer responses to compensation, speed of recovery and apology after a service failure , 2004 .

[50]  Celso Augusto de Matos,et al.  Service Recovery Paradox: A Meta-Analysis , 2007 .

[51]  J. H. Frey,et al.  The Interview: From Structured Questions to Negotiated Text , 2000 .

[52]  Geoff Lancaster,et al.  Communicating in the new interactive marketspace , 2008 .

[53]  Ling Peng,et al.  Manufactured opinions: The effect of manipulating online product reviews , 2018, Journal of Business Research.

[54]  Anne L. Roggeveen,et al.  Understanding the co-creation effect: when does collaborating with customers provide a lift to service recovery? , 2012 .

[55]  C. Robson,et al.  Real World Research: A Resource for Social Scientists and Practitioner-Researchers , 1993 .

[56]  Dhruv Grewal,et al.  Fix It or Leave It? Customer Recovery from Self-service Technology Failures , 2013 .

[57]  Patrick Fennell,et al.  The road to recovery: Overcoming service failures through positive emotions , 2016 .

[58]  Yves Van Vaerenbergh,et al.  Co-creating service recovery after service failure: The role of brand equity , 2017 .

[59]  Wilson Ozuem,et al.  Recovery Strategies in On-Line Service Failure , 2013 .

[60]  R. Yin.  Case Study Research: Design and Methods , 1984 .

[61]  Bryan Marshall,et al.  Does Sample Size Matter in Qualitative Research?: A Review of Qualitative Interviews in is Research , 2013, J. Comput. Inf. Syst..

[62]  Endel Tulving,et al.  Encoding specificity and retrieval processes in episodic memory. , 1973 .

[63]  B. Gu,et al.  First Step in Social Media - Measuring the Influence of Online Management Responses on Customer Satisfaction , 2011 .

[64]  Michael W. Kraus,et al.  Having less, giving more: the influence of social class on prosocial behavior. , 2010, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[65]  N. Miller,et al.  Frustration and aggression , 1939 .

[66]  A. B. Casado-Díaz,et al.  Explaining consumer complaining behaviour in double deviation scenarios: the banking services , 2009 .

[67]  Joseph A. Maxwell,et al.  Qualitative Research Design: An Interactive Approach , 1996 .

[68]  Laura Johnson,et al.  How Many Interviews Are Enough? , 2006 .