Showing papers on "Service provider published in 1970"

Considering Customer Loyalty in Developing Service Recovery Strategies

Abstract: Customer loyalty has been an often suggested and supported consequence of effective service recovery management. We predicted that customer loyalty would also play an antecedent role in the recovery process by interacting with perceived unfairness in influencing subsequent reactions. We found that perceptions o f both distributive and procedural fairness in recovery management had more significant influences on reactions by loyal customers. Furthermore, the effectiveness of service recovery had the strongest influence on loyal customers. Implications for service recovery strategies are discussed. ********** Substantial evidence (e.g., Tax & Brown, 1998) supports the importance of effectiveness in the management of service recovery. Service recovery has been defined (Johnston and Hewa, 1997) as the "actions of a service provider to mitigate and/or repair the damage to a customer that results from the provider's failure to deliver service as it is designed" (p. 467). Examples of failures (Bitner, Booms, & Tetreault, 1990) include unavailable service, unreasonably slow service and other core service problems (e.g., hotel room not clean, restaurant meal is cold, baggage arrives damaged, etc.). Some studies (see Dube and Maute [1996] for a review) suggest that over half of brand switching in services is attributable to service failures and poor management of recovery. Given the high costs (e.g., loss of both current and potential customers due to negative communications and poor reputation) associated with poor recovery, managers have begun to take steps to mitigate the negative consequences associated with failures in service firm-customer exchanges. Much of the research on reactions in exchange relationships points to the importance of perceived fairness by parties to the exchange. A vast amount of literature (see Greenberg [1990] for a review) suggests that perceptions of fairness in exchanges with management are significant predictors of employee workplace attitudes and behaviors. Past research has also established that attitudes about fairness are useful for analyzing and understanding customers' evaluations of services in their exchanges with providers. It has been suggested (Berry, 1995) that customers' perceptions of fairness are inseparable from, and captured in all dimensions of service quality. Equity or justice theory has also been used to explain reactions to specific experiences and conflicts in various (e.g., organization-employee, manager-employee, legal authority-citizen, parent-child) exchange relationships (Folger & Konovsky, 1989; Tyler, 1989; Tyler, 1994). More specifically, this framework has been useful for understanding customer reactions to service failures and subsequent recovery management (e.g., Blodgett, Hill & Tax, 1997; Hoffman & Kelley, 2000; Miller, Craighead & Karwan, 2000; Tax, Brown, & Chandrashekaran, 1998). Customer perceptions of distributive (outcomes and remedies offered), and procedural (policies used and followed in the process as well as interpersonal treatment of the customer) fairness in recovery management have been found to significantly influence customers' attitudes (trust and commitment) as well as behavioral intentions (repatronage, negative word-of-mouth) following the service failure (e.g., Blodgett, et al., 1997; Tax, et al, 1998). Customer loyalty has been studied extensively in the management and marketing literatures and its benefits and link to profitability have been well established (see Curasi and Kennedy [2002] and Rundle-Thiele & Mackay [2001] for reviews). Some studies (e.g., de Ruyter & Wetzels, 2000; Johnston & Hewa, 1997; Tax & Brown, 1998) have analyzed customer loyalty as a consequence of successful service recovery strategies. Our purpose in this study is to analyze the potential for customer loyalty to play an antecedent role in service recovery by interacting with perceptions of unfairness to influence post-failure reactions. …

Service Management For Differentiated Services Networks

Abstract: This work presents and evaluates a functional architecture and a framework for mapping service management policies and constraints into differentiated services (DiffServ) mechanisms. Several simulation scenarios described through the use of service policies are introduced and analyzed. It is shown that the use of service level management allows for efficient dynamic traffic engineering of DiffServ backbones. It is also shown that the use of active policies can assure better service to users by better enforcing service level agreements.