Satisfaction and post-purchase intentions with service recovery of online shopping websites: Perspectives on perceived justice and emotions
Highlights
► Distributive justice is most influential on post-purchase intentions with recovery. ► All three perceived justices increase post-recovery satisfaction. ► Distributive and procedural justices raise positive emotion and less negative one. ► Positive emotions increase post-recovery satisfaction and vice versa. ► Post-recovery satisfaction positively affects post-purchase intentions.
Introduction
The inseparable and intangible nature of services makes it difficult for service providers to avoid service failures during service delivery. Customers experiencing a service failure may convey their dissatisfaction to others through negative word-of-mouth and a negative sentiment towards the offending service provider, adversely impacting customers, profits, and even company reputation (Bitner, Brown, & Meuter, 2000). Most customers whom encounter a service failure anticipate service recovery (Blodgett et al., 1997, Goodwin and Ross, 1992, Holloway and Beatty, 2003). Via effective recovery strategies, service providers can still appease unsatisfied customers, increase the customer retention rate (McCollough, Berry, & Yadav, 2000) and even foster a long lasting relation with dissatisfied customers (Kelley, Hoffman, & Davis, 1993), ultimately making them loyal ones (Boshoff, 1997).
Despite the numerous studies on service failure and service recovery, most focus on physical providers of services. Rapid advances of e-commerce in recent years have increased the prevalence of online shopping as a vital business model. Even so, online shopping failure is still inevitable. When service failure occurs, service providers must take appropriate recoveries to return dissatisfied customers to a state of satisfaction, enhance customer retention rate and even help build long-term relationships that make customers loyal. Therefore, online shopping service failure and recovery strategies have become important issues for academics and practitioners (Holloway & Beatty, 2003). While many researchers (e.g., Collier and Bienstock, 2006, Forbes et al., 2005, Holloway and Beatty, 2003, Holloway and Beatty, 2008, Kuo et al., 2011, Wang et al., 2010) have extended service failure and service recovery research in cyberspace, most have focus on the typology of online retailing service failures and recoveries as well as seldom explore the relationships between customer post-recovery satisfaction and post-purchase intentions with service recoveries in the context of online retailing.
Justice theory has received many attentions as a theoretical framework for service recovery studies (Ha and Jang, 2009, Hoffman and Kelley, 2000, Maxham III, 2001, Schoefer, 2008, Smith et al., 1999, Sparks and McColl-Kennedy, 2001, Tax et al., 1998, Wirtz and Mattila, 2004). Prior studies have pointed out that perceived justice is identified as a key cognitive influence in the formation of subsequent customer satisfaction and post-purchase intentions in service recovery situations (del Río-Lanza et al., 2009, Ha and Jang, 2009, McColl-Kennedy and Sparks, 2003, Schoefer, 2008). Additionally, customer emotions triggered by service recovery encounters affect satisfaction (Chebat and Slusarczyk, 2005, del Río-Lanza et al., 2009, Schoefer and Ennew, 2005, Smith and Bolton, 2002). Although emotions are also considered as playing an important role in customers evaluating service failures and perceptions of service recovery experiences (Bagozzi et al., 1999, Schoefer and Diamantopoulos, 2008, Weiss et al., 1999), empirical investigations of emotional responses of customers to service recovery encounters are seldom evaluated (del Río-Lanza et al., 2009). Additionally, perceived justice usually represents a cognitive appraisal concept, whereas its effects have been shown to be both emotional and behavioral following service recovery experiences (Chebat and Slusarczyk, 2005, Schoefer and Ennew, 2005). The integration of emotions within the perceived justice of service recovery seems a necessary step to better understand what drives customers’ evaluative judgments in a recovery situation. In the e-shopping context, to the best of our knowledge, no empirical study has specifically addressed how customers’ cognitive justice perceptions and emotional responses to service recovery encounters combine to influence subsequent customer satisfaction and post-purchase intentions with service recovery. Therefore, this study investigates post-recovery satisfaction and post-purchase intentions with service recovery of online shopping customers from the perspectives on perceived justice and emotional responses to fill this important gap. Based on those results, suggestions are provided to operators and managers of online shopping websites.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews relevant literature on service failures and recoveries of online shopping and constructs of this study, and then develops research hypotheses. Next, Section 3 describes the research methodology and research design. Additionally, Section 4 summarizes the analytical results. Discussion and conclusions are finally drawn in Section 5.
Section snippets
Literature review and hypotheses development
This section reviews the theoretical framework for this study, including factors such as online retail service failure and recovery, post-purchase intentions, perceived justice, emotions, and post-recovery satisfaction as well as develops the research hypotheses as follows.
Experiment and questionnaire design
Simulated service failure and recovery scenarios were used in our survey. Via these virtual scenarios, respondents’ reactions in each service failure and recovery context can be understood as if they were realistically involved in it. In contrast with the conventional method of asking respondents to answer questions based on their memory, this method can more effectively avoid biases caused by fading of memory, reasonable tendency, and consistency factors, subsequently yielding a representative
Manipulation check
A mean possibility of the incidents occurrence (4.139) showed statistically significant great than 4 (p < 0.010), implying that the respondents perceived the scenarios to be highly realistic. A mean possibility of the recoveries (3.516) showed statistically significant great than 3 (p < 0.001), implying the high possibility that online shopping websites adopt the same measure as described in each of our scenarios. That is, these participants conferred not only that the simulated scenarios would
Discussion
Our results further demonstrate that online shoppers will raise positive emotions and decrease negative ones if they perceive distributive justice and procedural justice in a service recovery action. But perceived interactional justice has no significant effect on emotions. This may be due to the design and environment of online shopping websites, consumers are not easy to feel the interactional manner with offending service providers, therefore, the offender's dedication in this aspect does
Conclusion
This study provides empirical support for a new approach to understanding the antecedents of post-recovery satisfaction and post-purchase intentions with service recovery of online shopping by incorporating perceived justice and emotions perspectives. Contrary to previous findings, procedural justice and interactional justice were found to have no significant relationships with post-purchase intentions. This highlights the potential importance of taking perceived distributive justice for online
Acknowledgement
This research is supported by the National Science Council (NSC 97-2410-H-390-014-MY2), Taiwan.
Ying-Feng Kuo is professor in Department of Information Management, National University of Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Professor Kuo received his Ph.D. and M.S. in Industrial Engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington. He has published in more than 70 referred journals (e.g., Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, Computers in Human Behavior, Service Industries Journal, Total Quality Management and Business Excellence, Technovation, Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems, Expert
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Ying-Feng Kuo is professor in Department of Information Management, National University of Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Professor Kuo received his Ph.D. and M.S. in Industrial Engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington. He has published in more than 70 referred journals (e.g., Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, Computers in Human Behavior, Service Industries Journal, Total Quality Management and Business Excellence, Technovation, Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems, Expert Systems with Applications, Journal of Information Management, Journal of e-Business and others) and conference papers. His current research interests are in electronic commerce, service quality management, Internet consumer behavior and online community.
Chi-Ming Wu received his MBA in Economics and Management from National University of Kaohsiung, Taiwan. He has published articles in Computers in Human Behavior and academic conferences. His current research interests are in electronic commerce and service quality management.