دانلود رایگان ترجمه مقاله اثر بهبود خدمات بر حس عدالت و رضایت مشتری بر سایت های خرید آنلاین (نشریه الزویر ۲۰۱۷)

اثر بهبود خدمات بر حس عدالت، رضایت و قصد تبلیغات شفاهی مشتری بر سایت های خرید آنلاین

Effect of service recovery on customers’ perceived justice, satisfaction, and word-of-mouth intentions on online shopping websites

Abstract

As consumers become better informed and more demanding about their purchase of services, service provider’s failure to satisfy all consumers during delivery of service is unavoidable. Consequently, to alleviate consumer dissatisfaction that results from service failure has become important. However, empirical consensus has been lacking on the effects of various service recovery activities. Thus, this study examines the impact of different types of service recovery on customers’ perceptions of justice, post-recovery satisfaction, and word-of-mouth (WOM) intentions. The results indicated that consumers’ perceptions of distributive and interactional justice differ by the types of service recovery and supported significant relationships among perceptions of justice, satisfaction, and WOM intentions. The results implied that consumers respond differently to different types of service recovery and that consumers particularly favor apology among types of service recovery.

۱ Introduction

In today’s online markets, consumers are better informed, more demanding, and more knowledgeable about products and services (Miller et al., 2000); thus, service providers cannot avoid failing to satisfy consumers’ ever-increasing demands during service delivery. As such, it is impossible for service providers to completely avoid service failure, which refers to service mishaps that result in customer dissatisfaction. Since unsatisfied customers often switch brands, engage in negative word-of-mouth (WOM), and collapse loyalty (Miller et al., 2000), it is important to resolve customer dissatisfaction. Thus, increasing research and business attention is being given to service recovery as a significant marketing strategy to retain customers and maintain a relationship with customers (Maxham, 2001; Maxham and Netemeyer, 2002; McCollough et al., 2000). Service recovery is defined as the effort of a service provider to resolve a problem caused by a service failure and restore customer satisfaction (Lovelock and Wirtz, 2007). In particular, determining the most effective type of service recovery for a given service failure is an important issue. Previous service recovery studies have categorized recovery types into psychological recovery and tangible recovery. Psychological recovery provides customers who have experienced a service failure with an apology and empathy, while tangible recovery offers physical compensation for customers’ real damages, such as coupons, discounts, and free products (Bell, 1992; Zemke, 1994). Although psychological recovery is an inexpensive and effective alternative for a company, Clark et al. (1992) asserted that consumers prefer tangible recovery that provides a physical value. Despite the importance of investigating the differences between the types of recovery, research relating to this issue has rarely been conducted. Determining the relative effects of different types of service recovery on consumer satisfaction will provide significant strategic help for marketers seeking to find more effective and costefficient recovery types for their target consumers in the online market. As a cost-efficient recovery activity, apology would represent a more decisive activity for consumer satisfaction than compensation; in turn, marketers may save their investment without developing any tangible or monetary compensation for their consumers. Thus, this study had focused on the relative effects of the different types of service recovery (i.e., apology, compensation, and both apology and compensation) on customer’s evaluation process and their behavioral intentions. Most prior studies of service recovery have examined perceived justice in the relationship between service recovery and satisfaction as a part of consumers’ evaluation process (DeWitt et al., 2008; Gelbrich and Roschk, 2011; Homburg and Fürst, 2005; Maxham and Netemeyer, 2002; Smith et al., 1999; Voorhees and Brady, 2005). Perceived justice refers to how an individual consumer evaluates the fairness of a company’s activities and is generally broken into three categories: distributive, procedural, and interactional justice (Furby, 1986; Homburg and Fürst, 2005; Smith et al., 1999). Prior studies have supported the direct effect of perceived justice on a customer’s postrecovery satisfaction (Chang and Chang, 2010; Ha and Jang, 2009; Kau and Loh, 2006; Maxham, 2001; Maxham and Netemeyer, 2002; Schoefer, 2008; Smith et al., 1999; Tax et al., 1998; Wirtz and Mattila, 2004) as well as the mediating role of perceived justice between service recovery activities and post-recovery satisfaction (Gelbrich and Roschk, 2011; Homburg and Fürst, 2005; Smith et al., 1999). However, there has been mixed results on the relative effects of different types of service recovery on perceived justice (Davidow, 2003; Hui and Au, 2001; Levesque and McDougall, 2000; McCollough et al., 2000; Smith et al., 1999; Varela-Neira et al., 2010), as well as the relative effect of each dimension of justice on post-recovery satisfaction and behavior (Levesque and McDougall, 2000). Therefore, this study focused to specifically investigate the relative effectiveness of types of service recovery on perceived justice and post-recovery satisfaction to add empirical evidence to bridge the gap in the existing literature on this issue. Furthermore, previous studies have primarily focused on the typology and effects of service failure and recovery on customers’ responses in the off-line service industry; few studies have investigated the online shopping context (Kuo and Wu, 2012). However, service failure is likely to be more unavoidable and influential on consumer behavior in an online shopping environment in accordance with the characteristics of the online shopping environment. Despite the importance of studying service failure and recovery in the context of online shopping, the subject has received relatively little attention; the few studies on it have focused on the evaluation process, and their results have not yet reached a consensus. For instance, Kuo and Wu (2012) have studied consumers’ evaluation of service recovery in the online shopping context, but that research focused on consumer responses rather than comparing the effects of each type of service recovery on consumers’ evaluating process. In addition, the mixed results on the relative effects of different dimensions of perceived justice still appear in this study. Online consumers are more informed, demanding, knowledgeable, and capable of comparing many alternatives than offline consumers (Miller et al., 2000; Shankar et al., 2003); therefore, researchers need to further study the relative effects of different types of service recovery and the dimensions of justice to better understand various consumer attributes and expectations and develop more effective service-recovery strategies to meet each consumer’s expectations in the online market. Thus, this study focuses on an online shopping environment to examine how service recovery affects consumer behavior in that environment by comparing different types of service recovery. This study intended to examine the impact of different types of service recovery on customers’ perceived justice, post-recovery satisfaction, and WOM intentions in the online shopping context. Academically, we intend to bridge the gap in the existing literature regarding the relative effects of different types of service recovery and each different dimension of justice on consumers’ evaluation processes of service recovery. From a managerial perspective, the study represents a strategic framework that marketers may use to develop the most effective and cost-efficient types of service recovery that would best fit the target customers and help maintain customer relationships, particularly in the online shopping context.