Exploring the Effect of Service Recovery Strategy on Internet Consumers’ Satisfaction, Loyalty and Word-of-Mouth Intention

• Main Authors: Yi-Ling Fu, 傅怡齡
• Other Authors: 鄭菲菲
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/45935151671521063834

碩士 === 國立中興大學 === 科技管理研究所 === 102 === While more and more consumers are shopping on the Internet, they can easily change their mind and switch to other online shops if service failures happened (i.e., inappropriate packing). However, if the service failures can be recovered successfully, the customers will retain. Thus, the objective of this study was to examine the customers’ satisfaction, loyalty and positive word-of-mouth spread intention after the online retailers adopt different service recovery strategies when the participants experienced service failure. The second objective was to explore the moderating effect of gender and product category on the relationship between recovery strategy and customers’ satisfaction, loyalty and positive word-of-mouth spread intention. The study focused on the most common service failure type (packaging problem and slow/unavailable service) and three types of service recovery strategies (correction, replacement and unsatisfactory correction) as experimental stimuli. Five-point Likert scale anchored from 1=“extremely disagree’’ to 5=“extremely agree’’ was used to measure participants’ responses on satisfaction, loyalty and word-of-mouth intention. There are 605 subjects voluntarily participated the experiment, with 50 respondents in each experimental condition. The experimental results suggested that three types of service recovery strategy resulted in significantly different responses in satisfaction, customer loyalty and word-of-mouth spread intention. Specifically, correction and replacement resulted in significantly higher responses, while unsatisfactory correction caused the lowest responses on all three dependent variables. Moreover, the moderating effect of gender and product category in service recovery varies across different service failure types. Results from the study can provide theoretical contribution to service recovery literature in e-commerce context, as well as practical contribution to online retailers regarding the choice of appropriate service recovery strategies.