| With the rapid economic development,the status and importance of service industry in the economy has become more and more prominent,and the service industry has become a new engine for the long-term sustainable and healthy development and optimization and upgrading of China’s economy.The intangibility,heterogeneity,indivisibility and fallibility of the service itself make it impossible to avoid service interaction failure.At the same time,service innovation is an inherent requirement for service enterprises to achieve sustainable development,and it is the key to improve service level and service quality to gain competitive advantage.Most studies have viewed service failure from the customer’s perspective and in a negative way,and scholars have studied the effects of service failure on customer satisfaction,the effects of dimensions or categories of service failure,the effects of service failure and service recovery,measures be taken to mitigate the negative effects of service failure,and service interaction failure generated customer complaints,customer involvement,employee reflection or the effects of customer participation on service innovation.The research on service interaction failure and how it affects service innovation is still broad and fragmented from the employee’s perspective and in a positive way.Therefore,it is important to explore the potential impact paths of service interaction failure on service innovation in order to improve employees’ service experience and thus promote service innovation.This study defines the definition and classification of service interaction failure in this paper by combing the relevant literature on service failure and service innovation,and constructs a conceptual model of the effects of service interaction failure on service innovation and proposes relevant hypotheses based on value co-creation theory and absorptive capacity theory.Subsequently,the scale and questionnaire were designed and pre-survey was conducted so as to improve the questionnaire.After that,in the survey of service experience provided by service staff in the catering industry,400 questionnaires were distributed and 350 questionnaires were collected.After removing invalid questionnaires,316 valid questionnaires were examined and the data collected from the questionnaires were subjected to descriptive statistical analysis,reliability analysis and structural equation modeling and mediating effect test using SPSS and AMOS software.The study shows that deviations in response to customer requests have a significant positive effect on customer participation,information sharing,interactive cooperation,information recognition,experience assimilation,concept transformation and inertia change.Employee spontaneous and redundant behaviors have a significant positive effect on customer engagement,information sharing,interactive cooperation,information recognition,experience assimilation,concept shift and inertia change.Service innovation is positively affected by information sharing,experience assimilation,concept transformation and inertia change.Experience assimilation,concept transformation and inertia change play a mediating role in the relationship between deviations in response to customer requests and service innovation,and in the relationship between spontaneous and redundant employee behaviors and service innovation.This study examines the effects of service interaction failure on service innovation and constructs a conceptual model of how employees learn from service interaction failure and thus influence service innovation.The results of the study confirm the positive effects of service interaction failure and show that service employees can learn from service interaction failure and that knowledge absorption positively affects employee service innovation.This study extends the application of value co-creation theory and absorptive capacity theory,and enriches the research related to service interaction failure and service innovation.In addition,this study can help employees and service enterprises to correctly view and utilize service interaction failure,which has some implications for employees to provide service experience and management to conduct service management. |
