Few, if any, organisations can deliver 'zero defects' service to customers. The management of both complaints about service failure and the recovery strategies employed when critical incidents occur is therefore important because of its actual impact on consumer satisfaction and subsequent behaviour. The effectiveness of service failure management is dependent on a clear understanding of consumer reactions to service failure, recovery strategies, and the interrelationship between them with respect to the salience of service attributes and the concepts of 'blame attribution' and 'perceived justice'. The thesis focuses on service failure and recovery strategies within the UK hotel sector. It reviews the pertinent literature and reports the findings from two e-based questionnaires which examined service quality, service failure and recovery from the consumers' perspective. It is different from previous empirical work in this subject area because in contrast to both the large majority of published research on service quality and all previous empirical work on service failure and recovery, the conceptual framework is not based on the traditional expectancy-(dis)confirmation paradigm (where consumers evaluate a service by comparing pre-consumption expectations with actual performance). Instead, the research problem has been contextualised using service quality importance and performance constructs as predictors of consumer satisfaction and loyalty. The study also uses real critical incidents rather than the simulated service failure scenarios used by previous researchers. The analysis of service failure and recovery is therefore embedded in the context of the consumers' perceived importance of service attributes. It was hypothesised that the perceived importance of service attributes that fail ceteris paribus would significantly influence consumer reaction to the failure, the perceived effectiveness of recovery strategies and, in turn, the outcome of critical incidents with respect to overall satisfaction and loyalty. Therefore, whilst the 'performance-only' approach is now generally regarded as the most effective model in terms of its superior predictive validity over 'importance-performance' models (performance weighted by importance) in studies of consumer satisfaction with service providers, in the particular context of service failure and recovery, it was hypothesised and subsequently confirmed that the 'performance weighted by importance' model has greater predictive validity. The results are compared with those found in previous research and the contribution of the thesis to the academic literature are discussed. The implications of the findings for service managers are also evaluated.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:534501 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Bennett, Ian D. |
| Publisher | University of Salford |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://usir.salford.ac.uk/26578/ |
Page generated in 0.0039 seconds