Abstract Author : Alain Patrick Ngae a Njama Tutor : Peter Caesar Examiner : Pejvak Oghazi Title : After sales service: Complaint to Service Recovery Improvement Keywords : Service Recovery, Complaint handling, service failure, service process, Svetruck AB Background : It is real that everyday people purchase goods for their daily needs and satisfaction, but unfortunately it happen that some of those goods do not live up to the customer expectations. The reality when a failure occurred is something else because is the second chance giving to the service provider to show concern. Many research agreed that good recovery after a service failure can create a positive response from the customer side as example making them loyal and sharing their positive experience to others. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to look into how service recovery influence customer retention. Research question: How Does Company handles customer’s complaint in order to fulfill service recovery ? Method: Three respondents were selected within a heavy industry call Svetruck AB. Due to their position and number of year they have been working for this company. Many section of interview were organized in order to have a clear understanding of the inside out of the service handling process. Conclusion: Complaint handling appears to be very essential for each company willing to stay in the competitive word. Some will differ from the way they handle or treat their customer but the final issue for all companies will be to keep satisfies their customer for long-term relationship, also by reducing the cost of hunting new customers. Suggestion for further research : After the investigation of complaint handling from the service 3 provider side, we can think of other areas to investigate related to this topic. One of it will be to make an investigation on complaint handling from the customer point of view to find out how the customer perceived satisfaction after the service provider have handled their complaint. Another point may be to compare Svetruck complaint handling with the one of one of their mean competitor to see the point that differ them from the others. Further investigations can also be made on unsatisfied customers, those who have experience bad service recovery by then had chosen to switch to competitor.

Konkurrensen mellan hotellen idag ökar kraftigt. Hotellen måste fokusera på att verkligen göra gästerna nöjda för att de ska kunna konkurrera på marknaden. Oavsett hur bra service hotellen har så har det visat sig att misstag i servicen är oundvikliga, vilket ställer höga krav på hotellen att reparera sig från dessa misstag. För att hålla gäster nöjda krävs en god "service recovery", att vända missnöjda gäster till att bli nöjda. Receptionisterna är de personer som möter flest klagomål eftersom de interagerar med gästerna kontinuerligt. Därför är det relevant för managers på hotell att arbeta med att utveckla och stödja receptionisterna i denna service recovery-process för att servicen som helhet ska hålla en hög nivå. Studien syftar till att få en förståelse för om hotellföretag har strategier för klagomålshantering, och i så fall hur samspelet mellan managers och frontpersonal ser ut. För att få en ökad förståelse för detta har vi genom litteratursökningen funnit tre grundläggande teorier: service recovery, empowerment samt belöningssystem. Studien riktar sig mot fristående hotell men även större hotellkedjor för att på så sätt få en bredare bild av hur det ser ut i branschen som helhet. Empirin bygger på semi-strukturerade intervjuer som sedan analyseras mot den teoretiska referensramen för studien. Empirisk data används även för att analysera resultatet för att vidare besvara syftet med studien. Studien visade att frontpersonalen inom de valda hotellen har utrymme att själva hantera klagomål som kommer in. Ändå skickar de vidare klagomålen till managers som får lösa dem med gästerna. Samtidigt ser vi från managers håll att de inte utvecklar hållbara strategier för hur hanteringen av klagomål ska effektiviseras, även om vi ser att det ändå görs försök till detta. Ur detta finner vi att samspelet mellan managers och frontpersonalen inte fungerar effektivt. Det är otydligt vem som bär skulden för detta, om det är managers för att de inte skapar förutsättningarna för anställda eller om det är anställda som inte tar åt sig av förutsättningar som finns. Vi ser att det finns brister hos båda parter, eftersom frontpersonalen har svårt att ta åt sig av förutsättningarna, och för att managers inte skapar tillräckligt bra förutsättningar för frontpersonalen.

The customer is the most important resource for enterprises. Fonvielle thought customer satisfaction is the essential element of success for a business to continue operating forever in the competitive market. Researches indicate obtaining a new customer costs about five times more than keeping existed ones. If a company can reduce the rate of losing customers 5%, then it can enhance the profit 25% to 85%. Therefore, in order to boost the profit, enterprises should strive for raising customer satisfaction and loyalty. In accommodating for the implementation of National Health Insurance and the rapid changes of the whole environment, the health care industry has started to emphasize on health care management to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty by strengthening service quality and service recovery. The criteria of customer satisfaction and loyalty have been verified in other industries; however, there are relatively less studies in health care field. This research used PZB¡uSERVQUAL scale¡vas the matrix of its service quality scale and the six constructs of Boshoff¡¦s satisfied factors of service recovery as its service recovery scale. The questions of customer satisfaction part came from Taiwan College of Healthcare Executives¡¦ THIS satisfaction survey toward outpatient services. Besides the concept about which patients¡¦ loyalty is a kind of behavioral intention broached by Peltier (1999), the consideration of financial factors was added when framing the questions of customer loyalty part. The structure of this research was constructed by discussing the relationship among service quality, service recovery, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and background information. The result of this research discovers that perceptive service quality has a positive relationship with customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. The factors of perceptive service quality can explain 58.1% variation of customer satisfaction and 41% variation of customer loyalty, which means perceptive service quality, has a significant influence on customer satisfaction and loyalty. The effect of perceptive service recovery on customer satisfaction and customer loyalty is also significant; the factors of perceptive service recovery can explain 38.1% variation of customer satisfaction and 38.2% variation of customer loyalty. Furthermore, the finding shows a positive relationship between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty themselves; the former can explain 35.9% variation of the latter.

<p>Today’s economy is getting more service oriented and we live in a service society. The service sector has experienced a great development, which has implied and implies greater competition. The customers have a wider range of services to choose among and as a service provider, it is all about providing a superior service. However, being a service provider can sometimes imply a hard undertaking. Sometimes the service provider does not accomplish to provide the service perfectly. These situations are more known as service failures. Service recoveries are often used to recover service failures, which can e.g. imply an apology or offering the customer something extra at no cost.</p><p>To be able to act correctly in a service recovery situation, a com-pany can e.g. have a service recovery policy for how to act in service failure situations. A company can also choose to empower the front-line employees who interact frequently with the customers.</p><p>The purpose of the thesis is to determine the interrelation between service recovery policy and empowerment.</p><p>The research method chosen in this thesis is qualitative and the in-formation is collected by using semi-formal in-depth interviews as well as verbal protocols. One middle manager and one front-line employee representing three different service companies is partici-pating in the thesis. The three companies operate in three different industries within the service sector.</p><p>There is somewhat an interrelation between service recovery policy and the degree of empowerment. A non-specific service recovery policy seems to demand a high degree of empowerment while a specific policy does not seem to require a high degree of empowerment. According to the findings of this thesis, a company can also have a semi-formal policy and a medium degree of empowerment. This means that the more formal and specific service recovery policy, the less empowered staff is required.</p>

Organisations are facing increasing pressures in terms of customer service since customers tend to become more demanding as competition within industries increases. In order to succeed in this changing marketplace, organisations should focus on forming and maintaining long-term relationships with their customers. Developing long-term relationships, in turn, depends on the organisation?s ability to exceed customers? expectations and to continuously ensure customer satisfaction. Service organisations in particular find it difficult to provide constant customer satisfaction due to the high level of human involvement in service delivery, which often leads to inevitable service failures. Service failures, as a result, cause the disconfirmation of service expectations. This disconfirmation gives rise to customer dissatisfaction, which is generally considered as the initiator of customer complaint behaviour. Culture is regarded as one of the most influential factors affecting customers? behaviour in response to dissatisfaction with a purchase experience. Customers? culture could have an impact on the manner in which customers engage in complaint behaviour, and could also have a bearing on how service failures and organisations? service recovery efforts are perceived. Organisations functioning in a multicultural country such as South Africa could therefore benefit from gaining a more profound understanding of cultural influences on customer behaviour and specifically complaint behaviour. The primary objective of this study was to determine the influence of culture on customers? complaint behaviour pertaining to service failures within the context of the South African banking industry. A structured, interviewer-administered questionnaire was used to collect data from banking customers residing in Gauteng, who were sampled by means of a non-probability sampling method. In total, 600 respondents participated in this study, comprising 150 each from the black, coloured, Indian/Asian and white cultural groups. Results from the study indicate that although the majority of respondents have a propensity to complain, no practically significant differences were found between respondents from different cultures with regard to their propensity to complain. Results furthermore showed no differences between the different cultural groups in terms of their complaint behaviour following a hypothetical service failure. Although it was established that respondents expect the bank to do something about the service failure ? in particular correcting the problem and providing an explanation for the problem ? respondents? expectations regarding service recovery and perceptions of the bank?s service recovery efforts were found not to have been influenced by their respective cultures. The results, in addition, showed that a higher service recovery effort had a more positive effect on respondents? post-recovery satisfaction, likelihood of maintaining their relationship with the bank and loyalty, than that of a lower service recovery effort. It is recommended that banks should not view their customers differently in terms of their cultural backgrounds, but that they should rather focus continuously on providing all customers with the same level of quality service, even after a service failure has occurred. Banks should also encourage all customers to voice complaints directly to them in order to minimise the harmful effects of negative word-of-mouth and to improve recoveries from failures. Since respondents in this study indicated that they expect banks to offer an apology in the case of a service failure, to provide an explanation of the cause of the problem and to correct the problem, banks should ensure that a high level of quality interaction takes place between the dissatisfied customer and employees following a service failure. Such an approach requires banks to ensure that their employees are motivated and competent to solve customers? problems. It is therefore also recommended that banks should invest resources in employee selection, training, development, empowerment, discretionary decision-making power and support in order to ensure that customer-facing employees are able to provide a satisfactory service recovery, and are able to efficiently manage the complaint process. Recommendations for future research include extending this study to other service settings in order to determine whether there are similarities or differences in the influence of culture on customers? complaint behaviour pertaining to service failures. Future research can be conducted in collaboration with a specific bank in order to discover more specific information with regards to service failures and complaint situations within the bank, as well as customers? perceptions of the bank?s existing service recovery systems. Finally, since no differences between cultural groups were found, this study can be replicated in order to compare South African customers with those in other countries in order to determine differences in national cultures. / Thesis (M.Com (Marketing Management))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2011.

Organisations are facing increasing pressures in terms of customer service since customers tend to become more demanding as competition within industries increases. In order to succeed in this changing marketplace, organisations should focus on forming and maintaining long-term relationships with their customers. Developing long-term relationships, in turn, depends on the organisation?s ability to exceed customers? expectations and to continuously ensure customer satisfaction. Service organisations in particular find it difficult to provide constant customer satisfaction due to the high level of human involvement in service delivery, which often leads to inevitable service failures. Service failures, as a result, cause the disconfirmation of service expectations. This disconfirmation gives rise to customer dissatisfaction, which is generally considered as the initiator of customer complaint behaviour. Culture is regarded as one of the most influential factors affecting customers? behaviour in response to dissatisfaction with a purchase experience. Customers? culture could have an impact on the manner in which customers engage in complaint behaviour, and could also have a bearing on how service failures and organisations? service recovery efforts are perceived. Organisations functioning in a multicultural country such as South Africa could therefore benefit from gaining a more profound understanding of cultural influences on customer behaviour and specifically complaint behaviour. The primary objective of this study was to determine the influence of culture on customers? complaint behaviour pertaining to service failures within the context of the South African banking industry. A structured, interviewer-administered questionnaire was used to collect data from banking customers residing in Gauteng, who were sampled by means of a non-probability sampling method. In total, 600 respondents participated in this study, comprising 150 each from the black, coloured, Indian/Asian and white cultural groups. Results from the study indicate that although the majority of respondents have a propensity to complain, no practically significant differences were found between respondents from different cultures with regard to their propensity to complain. Results furthermore showed no differences between the different cultural groups in terms of their complaint behaviour following a hypothetical service failure. Although it was established that respondents expect the bank to do something about the service failure ? in particular correcting the problem and providing an explanation for the problem ? respondents? expectations regarding service recovery and perceptions of the bank?s service recovery efforts were found not to have been influenced by their respective cultures. The results, in addition, showed that a higher service recovery effort had a more positive effect on respondents? post-recovery satisfaction, likelihood of maintaining their relationship with the bank and loyalty, than that of a lower service recovery effort. It is recommended that banks should not view their customers differently in terms of their cultural backgrounds, but that they should rather focus continuously on providing all customers with the same level of quality service, even after a service failure has occurred. Banks should also encourage all customers to voice complaints directly to them in order to minimise the harmful effects of negative word-of-mouth and to improve recoveries from failures. Since respondents in this study indicated that they expect banks to offer an apology in the case of a service failure, to provide an explanation of the cause of the problem and to correct the problem, banks should ensure that a high level of quality interaction takes place between the dissatisfied customer and employees following a service failure. Such an approach requires banks to ensure that their employees are motivated and competent to solve customers? problems. It is therefore also recommended that banks should invest resources in employee selection, training, development, empowerment, discretionary decision-making power and support in order to ensure that customer-facing employees are able to provide a satisfactory service recovery, and are able to efficiently manage the complaint process. Recommendations for future research include extending this study to other service settings in order to determine whether there are similarities or differences in the influence of culture on customers? complaint behaviour pertaining to service failures. Future research can be conducted in collaboration with a specific bank in order to discover more specific information with regards to service failures and complaint situations within the bank, as well as customers? perceptions of the bank?s existing service recovery systems. Finally, since no differences between cultural groups were found, this study can be replicated in order to compare South African customers with those in other countries in order to determine differences in national cultures. / Thesis (M.Com (Marketing Management))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2011.

Sociala mediers framväxt och ökade användning av såväl företag som privatpersoner har ändrat förutsättningarna för bland annat interaktion, kommunikation och relationsskapande. Företag har även i allt större utsträckning börjat inse fördelarna med att använda sociala medier som en kanal för klagomål. Således innebär detta att sociala medier möjliggör för kunder att enkelt uttrycka sitt missnöje i en ny kanal. Klagomålshanteringen har i och med detta blivit offentlig och med tanke på dess transparens ställer detta krav på företag att hantera klagomål synliga för allmänheten, vilket kan inbegripa såväl utmaningar som möjligheter. Vidare är en förutsättning för att företag ska kunna hantera klagomål är att de har effektiva service recovery-processer. Det har identifierats ett forskningsgap där strategier för service recovery som är anpassade eller modifierade för kontexten sociala medier anses vara bristande. Service recovery för att hantera klagomål via traditionella kanaler anses därmed inte vara anpassade för företag som verkar på sociala medier. Således ligger det i intresse för denna studie att närmare identifiera hur processen att arbeta med service recovery via sociala medier ser ut i olika företag. Denna studie har för avsikt att besvara problemformuleringen; Hur arbetar företag med service recovery via sociala medier? Teoriavsnittet innefattar en redogörelse av identifierade teorier som finns på området. Två service recovery-strategier (Hart et al., 1990; Bell &amp; Zemke, 1987) presenteras kort för att sedan redogöra för Miller et al’s. (2000) ramverk för service recovery. Detta ramverk är utgångspunkt för denna studie och därmed görs en mer ingående redogörelse för delar av ramverket som är väsentliga för att besvara studiens syfte. Studiens resultat utifrån semi-strukturerade intervjuer påvisar att det är tre faktorer som företag bör prioritera i service recovery-processen på sociala medier; kundens känsla, ett personligt bemötande samt understödja arbetet med service recovery med hjälp av verktyg. Företag bör därmed utveckla service recovery-processer som fokuserar på att förstå kundens känsla, detta för att visa förståelse för kunden samt att lägga vikt vid känslan i bemötandet. Vidare inbegriper personligt bemötande bland annat att anpassa tonen efter kunden. Det är även nödvändigt med interna samarbeten och verktyg i form av stödsystem för att personalen som bemöter klagomål på sociala medier ska kunna arbeta effektivt. Slutligen bidrar studien med en reviderad modell för service recovery på sociala medier som har skapats i enlighet med studiens syfte och resultat. Denna modell kan förse ledningen på företag med rekommendationer samt vägledning i hur de kan utforma sina service recovery- processer på sociala medier.

Service failures are common in the hospitality industry and are often associated with low guest satisfaction. However, guest satisfaction is possible to be restored when excellent service recovery tactics are deployed in a timely fashion. The temporary unavailability of a service offering is a type of failure recognized by practitioners, customers, and the research community, yet it is typically only used for illustrative purposes in research. Given the ubiquity of this type of failure in the industry, the lack of investigations of its various aspects (e.g., communication of the occurrence to the customer, reasons, ramifications, etc.) seems surprising. Using scenario-based experimental design in a restaurant setting, this research tested the effects of timing (early/ late) of the communication of the temporary unavailability of a menu item on customers' satisfaction with the recovery, while taking into account the perceived severity of the failure as well as the relationship between customer and provider. Findings indicate that restaurant guests informed early that a menu item is unavailable are more satisfied than those who are informed later in their dining experience (after they have been given time to study the menu and make choices). This increased satisfaction is mediated through the customers' perception of interactional, procedural, and distributive justice. / Doctor of Philosophy / Things go wrong all the time in the hospitality industry; knowing how and when to address guests can make or break a business. For restaurants, the unavailability of a menu item is often an uncontrollable occurrence. In a scenario-based experiment, the present study tested guests' reactions to restaurant staff communicating the unavailability of an item early (during introductions) versus late (after the guests were given time to peruse the menu and make choices). The study took into account the type and duration of the relationship between guest and provider, as well as the fact that the guest may either be particularly interested in the unavailable item or indifferent. The results overwhelmingly pointed in one direction: the sooner the issue is communicated to the guests, the better. Respondents who were told early in their dining experience about a menu item being unavailable were significantly more satisfied than their counterparts (who weren't informed until late), and, overall, perceived the provider as more just. Anecdotal evidence shows different approaches to this type of issue but prior empirical evidence appears non-existent as to which approach yields optimal results, so the findings of the present study should be relevant to practitioners trying to retain guests after things have gone wrong.

A service recovery performance model is proposed and tested with data from frontline bank employees in Turkey. The model is derived from Bagozzi's (1992) reformulation of attitude theory. The empirical results suggest that top management commitment to service quality, as manifested by frontline employees' appraisal of training, empowerment, and rewards, has a significant effect on their perceptions of service recovery performance. The influence of management commitment to service quality on service recovery performance is mediated by frontline employees' affective commitment to their organization and job satisfaction. Implications of the results and further research avenues are discussed.

Avec 3,2 millions de voyageurs par jour, c'est pour SNCF Transilien l'équivalent en termes de flux d'un Airbus A380 décollant toutes les 6 secondes. Dans ces conditions extrêmes, une attention centrale est accordée à l'utilisateur au cœur du service. Notre thèse de doctorat s'inscrit dans ce cadre. Elle vise à modéliser et à fournir des solutions aux soins des utilisateurs en cas de détérioration de la production de transport ferroviaire. Notre contribution est de fournir un ensemble de recommandations concernant le processus d'optimisation afin d'atteindre un niveau de satisfaction des utilisateurs optimal compte tenu de l'instabilité de la production de service. À la suite d'une revue de la littérature, comprenant les spécificités des services, les concepts de recouvrement de service ainsi que des dimensions de perception et de satisfaction, nous mobilisons la théorie de la justice pour aborder la question de la gestion de la satisfaction de la clientèle en cas de défaillance. / With 3.2 million passengers per day, it is for SNCF Transilien the equivalent of an Airbus A380 taking off every 6 seconds. In these extreme conditions, a central attention is given to the user at the heart of the service, for breach of servuction. Our doctoral thesis fits in this framework. It aims to model and provide solutions to the care of users in case of deteriorated rail transport production. Our contribution is to provide a set of recommendations regarding the optimization process to achieve a level of satisfaction of users optimal given the instability of service production. Following a review of literature including the specificities of services, service recovery concepts as well as dimensions of perception and satisfaction, we will rely on theories of justice to give insights to the management of customer satisfaction.