Service Recovery Performance: A Critical Review of Literature

Abstract

In the service industry, effective service recovery is essential element to maintain customer satisfaction. Service firms can maintain good long-term relationships with customers to gain their loyalty, commitment, and product acceptance through providing effective service recovery. Because customer’s strong relationships with organizations and brands are underpinned by customer satisfaction. Regrettably, in the last two decades, the problem of poor service recovery was not handled adequately by service firms, consequently customers are not satisfied with the company’s effort toward service recovery, and complainant satisfaction is decreasing. To address this issue this paper synthesizes existing theory through a comprehensive literature review published on the topic by drawing general characteristics of the service recovery performance along with theoretical underpinning. Next, this study recognizes specific factors associated with service recovery performance. In addition, this article put light on theoretical methods that describes how/ why these factors work. finally, this article proposes four fruitful dimensions for further research. Additionally, this paper make contribution to the area of service recovery performance literature by critically analyzing and synthesizing existing research on factors associated with service recovery performance, by showing why and how these factors work.