The Roles of Service Failure and Recovery Satisfaction in Customer-Firm Relationship Restoration : Focusing on Carry-over effect and Dynamics among Customer Affection, Customer Trust and Loyalty Intention Before and After the Events

서비스실패의 심각성과 복구만족이 고객-기업 관계회복에 미치는 영향 : 실패이전과 복구이후 고객애정, 고객신뢰, 충성의도의 이월효과 및 역학관계 비교를 중심으로

Service failure is one of the major reasons for customer defection. As the business environment gets tougher and more competitive, a single service failure might bring about fatal consequences to a service provider or a firm. Sometimes a failure won't end up with an unsatisfied customer's simple complaining but with a wide-spread animosity against the service provider or the firm, leading to a threat to the firm's survival itself in the society. Therefore, we are in need of comprehensive understandings of complainants' attitudes and behaviors toward service failures and firm's recovery efforts. Even though a failure itself couldn't be fixed completely, marketers should repair the mind and heart of unsatisfied customers, which can be regarded as an successful recovery strategy in the end. As the outcome of recovery efforts exerted by service providers or firms, recovery of the relationship between customer and service provider need to put on the top in the recovery goal list. With these motivations, the study investigates how service failure and recovery makes the changes in dynamics of fundamental elements of customer-firm relationship, such as customer affection, customer trust and loyalty intention by comparing two time points, before the service failure and after the recovery, focusing on the effects of recovery satisfaction and the failure severity. We adopted La & Choi (2012)'s framework for development of the research model that was based on the previous research stream like Yim et al. (2008) and Thomson et al. (2005). The pivotal background theories of the model are mainly from relationship marketing and social relationships of social psychology. For example, Love, Emotional attachment, Intimacy, and Equity theories regarding human relationships were reviewed. As the results, when recovery satisfaction is high, customer affection and customer trust that were established before the service failure are carried over to the future after the recovery. However, when recovery satisfaction is low, customer-firm relationship that had already established in the past are not carried over but broken up. Regardless of the degree of recovery satisfaction, once a failure occurs loyalty intention is not carried over to the future and the impact of customer trust on loyalty intention becomes stronger. Such changes imply that customers become more prudent and more risk-aversive than the time prior to service failure. The impact of severity of failure on customer affection and customer trust matters only when recovery satisfaction is low. When recovery satisfaction is high, customer affection and customer trust become severity-proof. Interestingly, regardless of the degree of recovery satisfaction, failure severity has a significant negative influence on loyalty intention. Loyalty intention is the most fragile target when a service failure occurs no matter how severe the failure criticality is. Consequently, the ultimate goal of service recovery should be the restoration of customer-firm relationship and recovery of customer trust should be the primary objective to accomplish for a successful recovery performance. Especially when failure severity is high, service recovery should be perceived highly satisfied by the complainants because failure severity matters more when recovery satisfaction is low. Marketers can implement recovery strategies to enhance emotional appeals as well as fair treatments since the both impacts of affection and trust on loyalty intention are significant. In the case of high severity of failure, recovery efforts should be exerted to overreach customer expectation, designed to directly repair customer trust and elaborately designed in the focus of customer-firm communications during the interactional recovery process to affect customer trust rebuilding indirectly. Because it is a longer and harder way to rebuild customer-firm relationship for high severity cases, low recovery satisfaction cannot guarantee customer retention. To prevent customer defection due to service failure of high severity, unexpected rewards as a recovery will be likely to be useful since those will lead to customer delight or customer gratitude toward the service firm. Based on the results of analyses, theoretical and managerial implications are presented. Limitations and future research ideas are also discussed.

서비스실패는 고객이탈의 주요 원인이다. 오늘날과 같은 공급과잉의 치열한 경쟁시장에서 서비스실패로 인한 결과는 단순한 고객불평에서 끝나지 않고 해당기업에 대한 대중 소비자의 반기업정서를 유발할 만큼 치명적일 수 있다. 따라서 효과적인 복구전략 개발을 위해, 실패와 복구에 대한 고객반응을 심도있게 설명할 수 있는 연구가 필요하다. 이러한 맥락에서 본 연구는 서비스실패와 복구를 '고객-기업 관계의 위기와 회복'이라는 관점에서 조망하여, 복구만족도 수준에 따라 고객애정, 고객신뢰, 충성의도의 이월효과와 심각성의 직접 효과 및 실패 이전과 복구 이후 시점간 관계특질변수들의 역학관계변화도 비교분석하였다. 분석결과, 일단 실패가 발생하면 복구만족수준에 상관없이 충성의도는 미래로 이월되지 않았고, 실패의 심각성은 충성의도에 유의한 부정적 영향을 미쳤다. 다시 말해 실패의 발생으로 그 무엇보다도 고객충성도가 가장 큰 타격을 입었다. 다행히 충성의도의 선행변수인 고객애정과 신뢰는 복구만족이 높은 경우 실패 이전에서 복구 이후로 이월효과를 보였다. 복구만족이 낮은 경우는 이월효과가 전혀 발견되지 않았고, 실패의 심각성이 문제시되어 신뢰와 애정의 회복에 장애물로 작용했으며, 과거에 비해 고객애정의 충성의도에 대한 직접 효과도 감소하였다. 일단 실패가 발생한 후에는 복구수준과 상관없이 충성의도 형성에 있어 고객신뢰의 중요성이 급증했다는 점도 중요한 발견점이었다. 연구결과를 통해, 실패복구상황에서 고객층성도 재구축을 최종 지향점으로 삼되, 그 과정에서 무엇보다도 신뢰의 회복을 최우선 목표로 설정해야 하고, 심각한 실패일수록 반드시 높은 복구 만족도를 달성해야 한다는 교훈을 얻었다. 복구만족의 조절효과 및 실패심각성과의 상호작용 패턴에 대한 흥미로운 발견을 바탕으로 이론적, 관리적 시사점을 도출하였으며 연구의 한계와 향후 연구과제에 대해서도 논의하였다.