The Impact Of Service Failure Attributions On Emotions, Complaints And Recovery Expectations Of Customer

With the rapid prosperousness of economy, services are provided a good opportunity for development and the requirements of customers is becoming higher. However, due to the heterogeneity and invisibility characteristics, service failures are inevitable. After service failures happen, consumers will firstly judge the reason of services failures subjectivity, causing negative emotions and service recovery expectations, and may produce complaints and reduce the consumer satisfaction and loyalty. In the past academic study, scholars basically focused on service failures reasons, consumer behavior and satisfaction after service mistakes, etc., and there were few ones for introducing custom attribution, and emotions as the intermediate variables influence of expectation and complaint behaviors.According to Nelson's (1974) service classification, the services are classified into three categories: search service, experience service and credence service, the researcher choose a representative industry respectively as the object. With the situational simulated experiment and the example of service failure in catering industry (search service), hair-dressing industry (experience service) and banking industry (credence service), we designed a questionnaire according to the theory model. Through the questionnaire pretesting, issues and collection, this study use reliability and validity analysis, descriptive analysis, variance analysis, structural equation modeling analysis and independent sample t-test to inspect the hypothesis of the model. We test the relationships of service classification, service failure attribution (attribution of company, customer and other factors), negative emotions (internal negative emotions and external negative emotions), complaints (complaints to enterprises and third organizations), and service recovery expectations (spirits and materials). Finally, this study puts forward corresponding remedial suggestions for service companies according to conclusion.The contributions of this study mainly include the following:1. The study conducts on the service failure attribution and emotions according service classifications, which remedy the defects in theory circle of service failure classifications, the severity of service failure and has certain innovation in theory.2. The emotion is divided into internal negative emotions and external negative emotions. We research complaints behavior and the influence of the remedial expectations, and find that the internal negative emotion doesn't influence consumer complaints behavior. This conclusion supplies the existing emotional theory and consumer behavior research.3. Based on the above research conclusion, we provide suggestion to companies about how to make service recovery to effectively improve the customers'satisfaction suggestion while service failure happens.