Service Failures And The Severity Of The Perception Of A Fair And Satisfactory Customer Secondary Effects

The problem of how to satisfy customers so as to keep the relationship with them becomes increasingly important due to the fierce competition in service industry. However, the failure rate of service is much larger than that of physical products due to the features of service. In view of this, how to provide effective service recovery to achieve consumer satisfaction after service failure becomes theoretically and practically significant.The previous scholars conducted a lot of research related to service failure attribute, service recovery attribute, consumer satisfaction after service failure and post-recovery behavior. One important achievement of the previous research was to put perceived justice theory into the study of service recovery, and they believed that the perceived justice has great impact on consumer satisfaction. While, the perceived justice doesn't influence consumer satisfaction independently, it is affected by many other factors, too. The current study in this field mainly focuses on placing service failure attribution or severity as the mediate variable between perceived justice and consumer satisfaction. They seldom study the impact of failure attribution and severity on perceived justice, and don't put them in one model to consider the comprehensive impact on consumer satisfaction, either. In view of this, the thesis mainly researches how failure attribution and severity influence perceived justice and consumer satisfaction so as to enhance the theoretical study of service recovery. In addition, the thesis provides some advices to service companies on how to improve the recovery efficiency by measuring key affective factors.The thesis builds hypothesis model and measure scale on the basis of literature review. It chooses restaurant industry and uses role play method to conduct questionnaire survey. The result of data analysis shows that the measure scale has good reliability and validity, covering what the author aims to detect. The thesis avails of structure equation model to test the hypothesis model. The result shows that service failure severity and locus attribution have negative impact on perceived justice and consumer satisfaction, but the controllability attribution doesn't have obvious impact on consumer satisfaction. What's more, the impact of severity on perceived justice and consumer satisfaction is much larger than that of locus attribution. In addition, the impact of severity and locus attribution on procedural justice is much larger than on the other two dimensions of perceived justice, and the impact of procedural justice on consumer satisfaction is much larger than that of the other two dimensions', too.The thesis puts service failure attribution and severity in one model to conduct the research, and measures their impact on perceived justice and consumer satisfaction respectively. The research achievement is meaningful to further understand the relationship between failure severity, attribution, perceived justice and consumer satisfaction, and is helpful to enhance the entire research model and expand the theory research in the field of service recovery, as well.In the meantime, the essay can provide some advice on service companies. That is, in order to improve consumer satisfaction after service failure, service companies have not only to enhance the recovery attribute itself, but to take effective measures in the perspective of service failure attribution and severity. Specifically speaking, firstly, service companies have to pay attention to solve the problem rather than find the reasons of service failure when the failure is serious. Secondly, service companies have to put more emphasis on procedural justice rather than compensation and attitude. Thirdly, the overall service process has to be fair, so that consumers can feel impartially treated and are satisfied to the recovery. Fourthly, service companies should give consumers flexible and appropriate compensation when service failure occurs. Fifthly, consumers must be informed when service failure happens, and service companies must make relevant explanation about the reason. Finally, the overall service system has to be improved to reduce the occurrence of service failure. All these suggestions are important for reducing recovery cost and improving recovery efficiency.