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精品潛在顧客面對服務接觸缺失的自我修復行為研究
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A Study of the Self-Recovery Behavior of Prospects to the Provider’s
Service Encounter Failure in Luxury Goods Industry
Summary
The human interaction component of service delivery is essential to the determination
of satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Since a service is more or less intangible, heterogeneous,
and simultaneously produced and consumed, it is difficult for marketers to meet customers’
expectations. Due to such uncontrollable factors in a service encounter, service failures
appear to be inevitable. Accordingly, frontline employees play a pivotal role in face-to-face
service encounters because they can affect customer perceptions of service quality,
satisfaction, and value. The more accurate their perceptions are, the more likely their
behavioral adjustments are to improve customer satisfaction. However, there exists an
interesting phenomenon in the luxury goods industry that the dyadic behaviors between
frontline service employees and customers are not the same results as we would expect when
faced with service encounter failures. That is, although prospects in this industry express
their dissatisfaction, most of them do not switch service providers. We call this phenomenon
as “failure recovery paradox,” which refers to a situation in which prospects experiencing
service encounter failures are still willing to stay with that service provider even if the
prospects do not receive recovery actions from the service provider. The critical problem is
that these kinds of customers do not usually complain. Therefore, this article explores why
the prospects mostly will stay with the same brand even when experiencing service
encounter failure from the brand’s service provider in the luxury goods industry. With an aim
of understanding this paradoxical phenomenon, we propose a new construct– “prospect’s
self-recovery behavior”, to explain the reasons why the prospects do not switch and to
deliberate on the underlying consumption values they are seeking. It is worth noting that the
findings of our research provide new insights of service recovery behavior from the
customer’s perspective, not from the firm’s perspective.
For the research design, we use focus groups to collect experienced service failure data
from the respondents’ perspective, employ content analysis to identify sequential critical
incidents, and then interpret how the prospects develop their self-recovery mechanisms so as
to protect themselves from similar service failures that might happen in the next service
encounter. A critical incident is described as one that makes a significant contribution to an
Je-Sheng Huang
, Assistant Professor, Department of International Business, Tamkang University
Peng-Chun Chen
, Master, Graduate Institute of International Business, Tamkang University