SEQUENTIAL INFLUENCE OF SERVICE FAILURES AND RECOVERY STRATEGIES ON HOSPITLITY CUSTMER SATISFACTION AND REVISIT INTENTIONS Tingting(Christina) Zhang1, Soobin Seo2 The Ohio State University, USA,
[email protected] 2 The Ohio State University, USA,
[email protected]
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Introduction Considering that service failure occurs at any time of a service delivery process (Betts, Wood, & Tadisina, 2011), the timing of service failure and recovery strategies may influence customer satisfaction during their stay with a service provider. Although research on sequential influence has been widely adopted in pain judgment model (Link, Kos, Wager, & Mozer, 2011), social influence (Cosley et al., 2010), and decision-making studies (Jensen et al., 2006), limited number of studies have investigated the sequential influence of service failure and recovery in the hospitality industry. This study therefore fills this gap and makes contributions to the existing literature. This research consists of two related studies: Study 1 discusses the sequential influence of service failure and recovery in a hotel setting and Study 2 integrates brand equity effect into the sequential influence of failure and recovery in a restaurant setting. For these two studies, we use customer satisfaction and revisit intention as dependent variables to measure the customers’ attitudinal and behavioral intentions towards different timings of service failures and recovery strategies. The findings of this study provide useful practical implications to hospitality practitioners on how to utilize appropriate recovery strategies to minimize the decrease in customer satisfaction and revisit intentions after experiencing service failure. Methods Scenario-based experimental survey was conducted. Subjects were asked to read one of multiple scenarios respectively describing a service failure in a hotel/restaurant and service recovery packages the hotel/restaurant offers and make subsequent responses based on the scenarios they have read. Study participants were emailed with a survey kit that included a questionnaire and scenarios were randomly distributed to participants. A randomized sample of 683 adult customers who visited hotels/restaurant within 6 months with demographic diversity constituted the subject pool. After data screening, the number of valid responses were 582 (response rate was 85.21%). Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) with univariate follow-ups were performed to test the hypotheses. Results/Discussion The findings of this research indicated that customers at the earlier stage of their stay at the firm are more satisfied than those experience service failure at the latter stage of their stay. This paper also found that customers with high brand equity tend to be less satisfied with a service failure than those with low brand equity. For customer management, practitioners are advised to emphasize the importance of providing error-free service especially to customers with high brand equity. At the same time, for those hoteliers/ restaurant managers working at a famous hotel/ restaurant, it is important to improve service flawlessness in order to avoid customer dissatisfaction and loss of customers. References Available Upon Request
20th Annual Graduate Conference Proceedings, University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee
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