Customer equity considerations in service recovery: a cross‐industry perspective

Abstract

Service recovery, or “doing things very right the second time” has been identified as a strategic issue in the services marketing and management literature. So far, much of the research on this phenomenon has departed from the disconfirmation paradigm. However, since perceptions of fairness play such an important role in service recovery situations, it seems desirable to supplement extant literature with the equity paradigm. Therefore, we designed an experimental study to assess the impact of customer equity considerations on perceived quality, satisfaction, loyalty and trust with respect to service recovery across different service industries. Our findings reveal that in general, distributional fairness and procedural fairness during the service recovery significantly improve scores for service quality, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and trust, whereas interactional fairness only enhances customer trust perceptions. Furthermore, our results suggest that the effects of equity considerations in a service recovery situation are idiosyncratic to specific service industries.