Abstract:

Service failure and recovery is a well-established area of services research. Research has shown that service recovery is critically important from a managerial perspective in terms of maintaining customer relationships. Yet few firms excel at handling service failures. There is a growing number of managers who claim that customers tend to be dissatisfied with their service recovery effort. Their employees cannot improve service processes when they experience recovery situations and their companies still does not learn from service failure. Michel et al (2007) attribute the service recovery ineffectiveness to the competing interests for managing employees, customers and processes. We agree with their contention that to address these criticisms, complaint management must first acknowledge and then find new approaches to achieve consistency and to correct the misalignement of interests that can exist between the actions of the organisation and the needs of its customers and employees. We believe that search in the customer knowledge management literature represent one effective means to enhance a firm ability to implement a cohesive service recovery strategy.