Justice-based Service Recovery Strategies: An Extension Approach

Service marketing and the relevant researches are important components of the marketing field. In this business world, services are everywhere, however, with the occurrence of service failures sometimes. The rationality of service failures existed is explained by the essential difference between product consumption and service encounter. There are two main ways to avoid the loss of service failures: first, to reduce service failures, and the second is an effective service recovery. Researchers have concerned with this field and presented an important branch of service marketing - service recovery. Considering the current low level of domestic theoretical research on service recovery and the imperative managerial practice, and on the basis of systematic studying recent literature, the researcher chooses the medical services industry that is typical in service problems, to study the service recovery strategies, which are important in both theory and practice.With the application of the mainstream theory - equity theory, this study views the distributive justice and the procedural/interactive justice of service recovery as two operating variables. The researcher designs 8 units of scenarios of service failures and recoveries about hospital services, and measures the impact of the perceived fairness on customer satisfaction and behavioral intentions. The main findings are: (1) high-level service recovery measures and efforts provided by service supplier can be perceived and responsed actively by customers; (2) customer perception of the changes in procedural/interactive justice is more sensitive and stronger than in distributive justice; (3) in severe service failure condition, the distributive justice is more important than the procedural/interactive justice, but in minor failure condition, the more important factor is the procedural/interactive justice; (4) in the course of remedial services, the interactive effect between distributive justice and procedural/interactive justice contributes to customer satisfaction through synergy. Based on these findings, the researcher develops preventive and remedial recovery strategies for both severe and minor service failures by diamond thinking method and extension analytical tools of extenics.The major contributions in this study include: (1) the subject reflects the thinking of combining theory with practice; (2) the development of an integrated research framework, which is a three-phase model according to the natural occurring phase of service failures and service recoveries; (3) focusing on the impact of customer perception of distributive justice and procedural/interactive justice on recovery consequences, and some key conclusions with universal significance being drawn; (4) creatively utilizing the extension theory to research service recovery problem.