Beverley Sparks

Application of Fairness Theory to Service Failures and Service Recovery

This article presents a fairness theory-based conceptual framework for studying and managing consumers’ emotions during service recovery attempts. The conceptual framework highlights the central role played by counterfactual thinking and accountability. Findings from five focus groups are also presented to lend further support to the conceptual framework. Essentially, the article argues that a service failure event triggers an emotional response in the consumer, and from here the consumer commences an assessment of the situation, considering procedural justice, interactional justice, and distributive justice elements, while engaging in counterfactual thinking and apportioning accountability. More specifically, the customer assesses whether the service provider could and should have done something more to remedy the problem and how the customer would have felt had these actions been taken. The authors argue that during this process situational effort is taken into account when assessing accountability. When service providers do not appear to exhibit an appropriate level of effort, consumers attribute this to the service provider not caring. This in turn leads to the customer feeling more negative emotions, such as anger and frustration. Managerial implications of the study are discussed.

Evaluative and relational influences on service loyalty

Four attitudinal components of customer loyalty were synthesised from the services literature and combined to produce a loyalty conceptualisation that excludes repurchase behaviour. This proposed conceptualisation of service loyalty was then modelled in two quantitative studies to determine the effects of potential predictors. The influence of consumers’ evaluative judgements was compared against the effects of relational outcomes. The three evaluative judgement measures were service encounter satisfaction, perceived core service quality and value for money while relational measures comprised social comfort, social regard and friendship. It was found that while personal friendship between customer and service employee was significantly associated with loyalty, service encounter satisfaction was the major predictor. It was also found that the relational factors of social comfort and social regard played indirect roles through their influence on customer’s evaluation of satisfaction and quality. Conversely, friendship was not related to the mediating variables of service encounter satisfaction and perceived core service quality.

The Role of Gender in Reactions to Service Failure and Recovery

Male and female consumers place different emphasis on elements of the service recovery process. Perceptions were influenced by gender of the service provider and by a match of customer and service provider gender. The study, an experimental design with 712 respondents, found that when service providers, irrespective of gender, display concern and give customers voice and a sizable compensation, both men and women reported more positive attitudes compared with when this was not so. Combinations of high voice with high outcome and high voice with high concern were especially important in positively influencing perceptions of effort, regardless of gender. However, the authors also found that there were significant differences between male and female respondents regarding their perceptions of how service recovery should be handled. Women want their views heard during service recovery attempts and to be allowed to provide input. Men, in contrast, do not view voice as important.

Complaining in Cyberspace: The Motives and Forms of Hotel Guests' Complaints Online

Traditionally, consumers who have been dissatisfied with service have typically complained to the frontline personnel or to a manager in either a direct (face-to-face, over the phone) manner, indirect by writing, or done nothing but told friends and family of the incident. More recently, the Internet has provided various “new” ways to air a grievance, especially when little might have been done at the point of service failure. With the opportunity to now spread word-of-mouth globally, consumers have the potential to impact the standing of a brand or a firms reputation. The hotel industry is particularly vulnerable, as an increasing number of bookings are undertaken via the Internet and the decision process is likely to be influenced by what other previous guests might post on many booking-linked sites. We conducted a qualitative study of a key travel site to ascertain the forms and motives of complaints made online about hotels and resorts. 200 web-based consumer complaints were analyzed using NVivo 8 software. Findings revealed that consumers report a wide range of service failures on the Internet. They tell a highly descriptive, persuasive, and credible story, often motivated by altruism or, at the other end of the continuum, by revenge. These stories have the power to influence potential guests to book or not book accommodation at the affected properties. Implications for managers of hotels and resorts are discussed.

Restaurants and the tourist market

Previous research has shown that restaurants are an important factor in the choice of a holiday destination for some tourists. Research has also found that the restaurants at a destination can enhance the guests’ overall satisfaction with the destination. This research was sponsored by the Co‐operative Research Centre for Sustainable Tourism in Australia and investigates the relationship between the tourist destination, restaurants and tourists. The study is based on the results of interviews with 459 tourists. The findings of the study provide support for the proposition that tourists perceive restaurants as an important attribute of a tourist destination. The study also provides insight into how tourists select restaurants. This information is useful to managers of restaurants in tourist destinations. Both destination marketers and restaurant managers will benefit from this study.

Customer Engagement With Tourism Brands: Scale Development and Validation

Although customer engagement (CE) has emerged as a widely used term in many industries, including tourism and hospitality, academic research lacks a clear conceptualization and rigorous measurement of the construct. This study develops and validates a 25-item CE scale that comprises five factors: identification, enthusiasm, attention, absorption, and interaction. The scale, developed from a survey of hotel and airline customers, demonstrated strong psychometric properties across multiple samples and showed CE to exert a positive significant influence on behavioral intention of loyalty for both hotel and airline customers. The scale offers a framework for future empirical research in this increasingly important area, and it provides a useful tool for tourism practitioners to collect insights into customer psychological and behavioral connections with their brands beyond the service consumption experience.

The impact of staff empowerment and communication style on customer evaluations: The special case of service failure

Empowering front-line staff to deal with service failures has been proposed as a method of recovering from service breakdown and ensuring greater customer satisfaction. However, no empirical study has investigated consumer responses to empowerment strategies. This research investigates the effect on customer satisfaction and service quality of two employee characteristics: the degree to which the employee is empowered (full, limited, and none), and the employees communication style (accommodative - informal and personal, and underaccommodative-formal and impersonal). These employee characteristics are studied within the context of service failures. Subjects were shown videotaped service scenarios, and asked to complete satisfaction and service quality ratings. Results revealed that the fully empowered employee produced more customer satisfaction than the other conditions, but only when the service provider used an accommodating style of communication. Fully empowered and nonempowered employees were not judged differently when an underaccommodating style of communication was adopted

Investing in Interactional Justice: A Study of the Fair Process Effect within a Hospitality Failure Context:

Past research has demonstrated that considerations of distributive, procedural, and interactional justice independently influence customers’ fairness and satisfaction ratings in many contexts. Other research shows evidence of a “fair process” effect—a tendency for customers to be more accepting of poor outcomes when they perceive the outcome allocation process to be fair. Van den Bos, Lind, Vermunt, and Wilke (1997) have reported that this effect may operate only when the outcomes received by others are unknown. Set in a hospitality service recovery context, this study examined the impact of interactional justice and knowledge of others’ outcomes on customers’ service evaluations. A 2 (interactional justice) 4 (others’ outcomes) experimental design was employed in which 176 respondents reported their perceptions of fairness and levels of satisfaction after imagining themselves to be customers in a hypothetical service scenario. Contrary to previous research, evidence of the fair process effect was found irrespective of the presence or absence of information regarding others’ outcomes. Implications for the tourism and hospitality industry and justice theory development are discussed.

Effect of social influence on repurchase intentions

The social interaction between customers and individual employees can be critical for business success. Similarly, factors such as customer convenience and value for money are important to repeat purchase. Frontline employees often face the dilemma of how much social interaction is appropriate. Data were collected in a cross‐sectional survey of 406 customers to determine the relative importance of social influence on repurchase intentions across three services. The findings show that social influence variables can be as important as convenience and value for money factors. Further, the data indicate that the nature of the interaction is the critical factor, rather than the amount of social interaction. For naturopathic clinics, the enthusiasm shown by the health care professional is the key factor, whereas in hairdressing salons, making the customer feel relaxed and comfortable is critical.

Providing an explanation for service failure: context, content, and customer responses.

This study investigated the role of explanations or accounts in mitigating the impact of service failure on customer satisfaction and loyalty in a hospitality context. The study used a between-subjects experimental design with different scenarios, which were presented to a sample of experienced hotel customers via a postal survey. The scenarios differed in terms of the severity of the service failure, the type of explanation (referential or justification) and the thoroughness of the explanation. The results suggest that referential explanations were associated with higher levels of satisfaction and loyalty than justifications, when the service failure was severe. Evidence was also found that account adequacy was an important mediator for the effect of thoroughness on satisfaction.