مقاله سال ۲۰۱۷

Many customers experience service failures. For example, the U.S. Department of Transportation (2016) reports that of the 423,889 flights in the U.S. in February 2016, a little b70,000 flights were delayed, and almost 7000 flights were cancelled. As service failures are a major cause of customer defection (Knox & Van Oest, 2014), managers benefit from understanding how to restore customer satisfaction following these events. Researchers propose several service recovery options, such as offering compensation, apologizing, showing empathy, and offering explanations (Gelbrich & Roschk, 2011). More recently, researchers demonstrate the viable benefits of co-creating service recovery with customers. A co-created service recovery refers to customers’ “ability to shape or personalize the content of the recovery through joint collaboration with the service provider” (Roggeveen, Tsiros, & Grewal, 2012, p. 772). Several studies show the positive effect of a co-created service recovery on customer satisfaction and repurchase intentions, especially since customers consider a co-created service recovery as more fair (e.g., Cheung & To, 2016). Interestingly, research also reveals that a co-created service recovery makes customers less likely to demand a compensation (Roggeveen et al., 2012).

This paper complements prior research in three ways. First, while researchers have been studying service recovery issues for over 40 years (Van Vaerenbergh & Orsingher, 2016), co-creating a service recovery emerged as a research stream only recently. The increased popularity of co-creation in service recovery calls for additional empirical verifications, particularly considering the increasing emphasis on replications in marketing science (Lynch, Bradlow, Huber, & Lehmann, 2016). Second, despite the observation that people’s evaluations of joint decision-making is driven by both justice and outcome favorability perceptions (Skitka, Winquist, & Hutchinson, 2003), the service recovery literature focuses predominantly on perceived justice as a theoretical mechanism. Researchers, however, question whether other mechanisms underlie the effects of service recovery on customer evaluations (Van Vaerenbergh & Orsingher, 2016). This study provides a better understanding of the co-created recovery—customer outcomes relationships by examining the mediating role of outcome favorability, that is customers’ beliefs that the received outcome is the most favorable of all potential outcomes.

Third, prior research mainly examines when a co-created service recovery is appropriate (e.g., in case of severe failures or when the employee initiates the co-created recovery; Roggeveen et al., 2012; Xu, Marshall, Edvardsson, & Tronvoll, 2014), but do not disclose whether all organizations benefit equally from doing so. This study examines the moderating role of the service provider’s customer-based brand equity (hereafter: brand equity), which refers to the differential effect of brand knowledge on consumer response to the marketing of the brand (Keller, 1993). Customers react differently to service failures caused by high- versus low-equity brands (Brady, Cronin, Fox, & Roehm, 2008). Despite the observation that organizations differ signifi- cantly in their brand equity, the literature seems to have taken for granted that organizations could apply the same recovery options. This paper therefore examines whether customer reactions to a co-created recovery depend on the service provider’s brand equity.