Research On Service Recovery And Its Strategies Based On Service Profit Chain

One of the characteristics of service is the invisibility of products, which cannot be produced in advance. In addition, due to the differences of expectations between service-suppliers and consumers, mistakes can hardly be avoided by enterprises. The theory of service recovery offered effective assistance to solve this problem. This research firstly illustrated how the 'service profit chain' theory plays roles in the modern service enterprises. It emphasizes that the profits of enterprise were based on customers' faithfulness, which derives from the satisfactory of employees and the service quality. By clarifying the relationships between the service recovery, customers' satisfactory and customers' faithfulness, it was suggested that the function of service recovery, especial the recovery relationship-oriented was confirmed, in enhancing customers' satisfactory and faithfulness to customers. Based on this, discussion was carried out in respects of customers and employees. In order to analyze the various levels of recovery in detail, this research classified employees in enterprises into contacting employees and supporting employees, and also defined the contact of internal service recovery.Furthermore, on the basis of service-profit-chain theory, the discussion was undertaken in aspects of internal service recovery and external service recovery, which became the key point of this article. In the process, the external service recovery was based on customers and contacting employees. Through the attribution analyzing of service failures, it was proposed that the recovery action should consider transferring the external attribution incline into internal part. Basing on the equity theory and the resource exchanging theory, the author induces the type of external failure and brings out the factors influencing the effectiveness of recovery. Moreover, on the basis of studying the action decision-making of customers suffering from service failures and the recovery actions made by employees, it offered customer-based and contacting employees-based service recovery strategies, respectively. Regarding the recovery of the internal functioning system, this research took the views of internal operation, knowledge management and quality management, and suggested that internal service recovery could deduce the difficulties of external recovery, as well as enhance the ability to defend mistakes, which kept promoting the increase of profits. It was also suggested that, internal service recovery did not only contain technology introducing, operation reengineering and encourage system perfecting, but also amending the internal service environment through taking the concepts of 'soft strength'.The theory of service profit chain emphasized the feedback relations between employees and customers, i.e., the satisfaction mirror. Thus, the author analyzed the feedback effect derived from the recovery action between customer and contacting employees and illustrated the interacting relations between employees and the internal system, which was defined as the two-leveled service recovery satisfaction mirror.Finally, this article concluded an integrated framework based on the recovery of the service profit chain, which may offer a general model for the service recovery research and the practices.