NoteDoes service recovery affect satisfaction and customer loyalty? An empirical study of airline services
Introduction
Even the best airlines periodically suffer from some form of service failure, such as overbooking or delayed flights. These failures can be highly costly for firms, as customers often switch to other service providers after such dissatisfactory experiences. Although airlines cannot eliminate service failures, they can learn to effectively respond to such events by means of service recovery procedures. Justice theory has been widely used to explain how customers perceive the service recovery efforts. Perceived justice is more precisely defined in terms of interactional, procedural and distributive justice. Interactional justice refers to the fairness of the interpersonal communications and treatment which consumers receive in their interactions with a firm’s employees. Procedural justice assesses the justice of the policies and procedures used by a firm to rectify service failures (Voorhees and Brady, 2005). Finally, distributive justice focuses on the compensation the customer receives with respect to the outcome of the recovery process (Sparks and McColl-Kennedy, 2001). We explore the three dimensions of justice in service recovery, and how they affect recovery satisfaction, overall satisfaction and customer loyalty.
Section snippets
Relationship between service recovery and recovery satisfaction
The notion that perceived justice precedes recovery satisfaction is supported by a number of studies. Tax et al. (1998) argue that distributive, procedural, and interactional justice strongly affect customer evaluations of service recovery, and Patterson et al. (2006) also find that positive perceptions of distributive, procedural, and interactional justice are all significantly and positively associated with service recovery satisfaction. To test the relationship between perceived justice and
Methodology
The questionnaire used was developed based on the studies reviewed above. The constructs incorporated into the model include interactional justice, procedural justice, distributive justice, recovery satisfaction, overall satisfaction and customer loyalty. Interactional justice, procedural justice and distributive justice are evaluated on the basis of four questionnaire items; recovery satisfaction is based on two items; overall satisfaction is measured with two items; finally, customer loyalty
Reliability and validity analyses
The Cronbach’s alphas for interactional justice, procedural justice, distributive justice, recovery satisfaction, overall satisfaction and customer loyalty are 0.92, 0.93, 0.94, 0.89, 0.92, and 0.88, respectively, which are all satisfactory (greater than 0.7). Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was employed to assess the adequacy of the measurement model. Results of the CFA indicate that the fit is acceptable for the data. Discriminant validity was also examined to confirm that one latent
Conclusions
The results suggest that interactional and procedural justice both influence recovery satisfaction, although there is no evidence of any influence of distributive justice on recovery satisfaction. Although distributive justice seems to reduce service disconfirmation and improve assessed service for the airlines, it does not appear to lead to any improvements in recovery or overall satisfaction or in customer loyalty. Moreover, no significant direct impacts from the three dimensions of perceived
Acknowledgments
This project was funded by grant NSC 99-2410-H-156-001- from the National Science Council, Taiwan. The authors are grateful to the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments.
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