Citation
(2014), "Executive summary of “Emotional antecedents and outcomes of service recovery: an exploratory study in the luxury hotel industry”", Journal of Services Marketing, Vol. 28 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/JSM-03-2014-0109
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Executive summary of “Emotional antecedents and outcomes of service recovery: an exploratory study in the luxury hotel industry”
Article Type: Executive summary and implications for managers and executives From: Journal of Services Marketing, Volume 28, Issue 3
This summary has been provided to allow managers and executives a rapid appreciation of the content of the article. Those with a particular interest in the topic covered may then read the article in toto to take advantage of the more comprehensive description of the research undertaken and its results to get the full benefit of the material present.
Many service sectors, the hotel sector included, have moved toward deskilling of tasks and, in price-sensitive markets, competing with one another for low-cost labor. That, however, can cause something of a problem at a time when research into how companies can better serve their customers regularly comes up with a common theme among the recommendations – that of choosing, training, developing and empowering front-line employees in a whole range of different skills and responsibilities.
Managers may nod their head in agreement when reading studies that demonstrate the need to have bright, experienced, personable, savvy staff to represent the company at the sharp end of the business. Then they might instruct whoever is responsible for hiring these supermen and women (the people who are the “face” of the organization to the customer) to keep to a tight budget. They might not use the words “Get ‘em as cheap as you can” but that’s the gist of it. And it’s something of a paradox.
It’s well known that the way in which a firm attempts recovery from a service failure can be a pivotal moment in its relationship with a customer. Indeed, it is also well known that such circumstances can even provide a unique opportunity to demonstrate that the firm really does have customers at its heart, and the recovery from the service failure can provide the chance to strengthen the relationship. It’s also more than likely that a service employee’s attitude, knowledge and skills can make the difference between a good and bad outcome to this challenge.
The responsibility placed on service organizations is difficult. On one hand, they must create a non-threatening environment to make complaining easier, while at the same time, design a recovery system around factors that matter most to the customer; build a relationship between the organization and the customer; engender loyalty; and influence the customer’s future behavioral intentions.
Although service failures are viewed as a defect or problem area, there is a view that the true test of an organization’s commitment to service quality is the way it responds to service failure. When a service organization experiences such a failure, it is faced with a unique window of opportunity to rebuild trust and commitment and satisfy the customer. If recovery is successful, trust can be re-established, but if not, a “spiral of distrust” may ensue.
In “Emotional antecedents and outcomes of service recovery: an exploratory study in the luxury hotel industry”, Dr Kristen Riscinto Kozub et al. suggest that the use of emotions can provide a better diagnostic tool for understanding attitudes that customers go away with following a service failure, rather than concentrating on cognitive measures of performance. Consequently, they note that the importance of emotions in customers’ evaluations of recovery highlight the need for employees to be selected, trained and evaluated on the basis of their emotional intelligence, and particularly their ability to identify, understand and respond to the emotions felt by customers. This study provides support for the use of emotions in understanding consumer behavior following a service failure.
In the context of the luxury hotel sector, they say, this may be quite a challenge, given that customers may come from diverse cultural backgrounds, with distinct ways of showing and responding to emotions. Companies in service sectors which face higher levels of potential failure may gain competitive advantage by paying more attention to the emotional aspects of service failure and recovery, rather than concentrating primarily on utilitarian, process-driven aspects of service recovery which are assessed cognitively.
Consumers’ evaluations of the recovery process are not based solely upon the outcome of the process, but the mechanisms used to recover. In other words, it is about not just what is done, but how it is done or how the customer perceives that they have been treated throughout the recovery process. Accordingly, there is growing interest in the influence of emotions on the service recovery process and their role in explaining future behavioral intention. The suggestion has been made that negative affect has a greater role to play than cognitive measures of satisfaction in explaining and predicting behavioral responses to service failure and ensuing recovery efforts.
Some apparently surprising results were found when individual emotions in isolation were examined. One finding was that the emotion of happiness post recovery did not correlate well with post-recovery behavioral intention, when measured both by absolute measures and change in emotion. This would appear to contradict the frequently repeated maxim that happy customers are an important objective for a company. One explanation may be that the recovery process is seeking to minimize existing negative feelings rather than maximize positive ones. Anger, disappointment and discontent were the two emotions that appeared to be most closely correlated with post-recovery loyalty.
To read the full article enter 10.1108/JSM-08-2012-0147 into your search engine.
(A précis of the article “Emotional antecedents and outcomes of service recovery: an exploratory study in the luxury hotel industry”. Supplied by Marketing Consultants for Emerald.)