Breaking the Boxes in Service Recovery Research

Guest article by Yves Van Vaerenbergh & Chiara Orsingher

Service recovery is studied extensively in service research. Service journals publish regularly papers on service recovery (a quick search on Google Scholar returns 1.800 papers containing service recovery in their title), and many studies are presented at service conferences. Combined, we have built up strong theoretical foundations on how to manage recovery. On the other hand, the situation in the field is not really positive. The 2013 U.S. Customer Rage Study by the CMCC shows that customer satisfaction with recovery is no higher than that reported by the 1973 White House Study, and U.S. businesses are losing billions of dollars because of poor service recovery. Roland Rust and Ming-Hui Huang’s recent service failure and recovery experience with United Airlines shows that even today, many organizations still struggle with getting their service recovery right (

Roland Rust and Ming-Hui Huang’s recent service failure and recovery experience with United Airlines shows that even today, many organizations still struggle with getting their service recovery right (http://www.servsig.org/wordpress/2016/08/service-failure-handling-at-united/).

In our most recent paper “Service Recovery: An Integrative Framework and Research Agenda“, we zoomed in on this paradox: Despite the fact that we have been studying service recovery issues for over 40 years, too many organizations still fail at providing good customer service. We synthesized this literature, and made some striking observations.

First, despite the simple observation that service researchers have interdisciplinary roots, and despite the numerous calls for interdisciplinary research on service issues, most of the research on recovery is nicely contained by disciplinary boundaries. We found very few studies approaching recovery from truly interdisciplinary perspectives. However, “real-world problems do not come in disciplinary-shaped boxes” (Jeffrey 2003, p. 539), and service recovery is no exception. Second, we found that most of the research takes a single-level of analysis approach to understanding service recovery issues: Researchers typically focus on how customers evaluate the organization’s recovery efforts, what factors drive the frontline employee’s recovery performance, or how organizations can develop service recovery systems. Most of the research has taken a single-level approach, by either focusing on individuals (customers or employees) or organizations; multi-level studies on recovery are extremely rare. Yet again, as a community we can have a stronger impact on organizational policies when conceptualizing phenomena at multiple levels simultaneously, including top-down (from organization to individual) and bottom-up (from individual to organization) processes (Kozlowski & Klein, 2000).

Based on our synthesis, we believe the time has come to think differently about service recovery. If we really want to improve service recovery in the field, we need to move away from approaching service recovery from a single discipline and at a single level at a time, and need to start considering service recovery as an integrated technical and social system that requires input from multiple disciplines at multiple levels simultaneously. Don’t get us wrong: we are not saying that single-discipline, single-level studies are not useful (we also have to plead guilty on that one, too J). Yet at the same time, we need to realize that these approaches fit within a broader framework.

In our paper, we offered an integrative framework as well as a future research agenda that might provide inspiration to both young and more established scholars interested in studying service recovery issues. Some of the most pressing research questions are:

• What drives organizations (not) to invest in recovery systems?
• What is the role of leadership in implementing service recovery systems across the organizations?
• How can we incorporate proactivity into these systems at different levels of the organization (e.g. individual and group level)?
• How do these systems influence frontline employees? Are strong recovery systems always beneficial?
• What matters most for stimulating frontline employee recovery performance – hiring the ‘right’ employee or training and rewarding them?
• Is justice the only framework through which we should conceptualize recovery?
• If we start studying actual customer behavior, do we come up with the same priority list of recovery options?
• How can employees and customers contribute to complaint-based process improvements throughout the organization?
• How can firms turn customer complaints into actual process improvements effectively?

These are some of the issues that are up for further exploration. We hope that our summary sparks new or renewed interest in the topic of service recovery, especially since too many customers are still left dissatisfied after complaining to organizations.

Yves Van Vaerenbergh
Assistant Professor of Marketing KU Leuven, Belgium

Chiara Orsingher
Associate Professor Department of Management University of Bologna, Italy

Reference:

Van Vaerenbergh, Y. & Orsingher, C. (2016). Service recovery: An integrative framework and future research agenda. Academy of Management Perspectives, 30(3), 328-346. doi: 10.5465/amp.2014.0143

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