Quality function deployment in failure recovery and prevention

ABSTRACT This paper presents a strategic model for proactively recovering and preventing service failures; it employs an analytical hierarchy process (AHP) to measure the severity of failure categories and ultimately employs quality function deployment (QFD) to identify the execution order of proactive recovery and prevention strategies. Questionnaires on AHP and QFD were used to collect data. The results show that the three most important strategies, ‘Educational training of employees,’ ‘Managerial level professional expertise and leadership,’ and ‘Staff appraisal, reward, and punishment systems,’ are within the purview of human resources management. Human resource management plays a key role in service failure and recovery management. For individual failure categories, business managers can select those that are most severe and execute proactive recovery and failure prevention strategies. We propose a methodology for designing service recovery systems and that addresses the gap in academic research on proactive recovery and service failure prevention.

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