Recovering Coproduced Service Failures

Abstract

This article focuses on the locus of recovery (LOR) when failures occur in coproduced services. LOR refers to who contributes to the recovery. Based on the LOR effort, recovery can be classified into three types: firm recovery, joint recovery, and customer recovery. The authors develop a conceptual framework to examine the antecedents, consequences, and moderators of LOR and test the framework using three experiments. They find that the positive effect of customers’ self-efficacy on their expectancy to participate in recovery is stronger when they blame themselves for the failure than when they blame the service provider. Joint recovery is most effective in generating favorable service outcomes of satisfaction with recovery and intention for future coproduction. Furthermore, recovery urgency strengthens the effect of LOR; however, when a customer’s preferred recovery strategy is offered, such matching offsets the impact of recovery urgency. Our findings suggest several managerial implications for devising recovery strategies for service failures. Although having customers do the recovery may appear to be cost-effective, when customers are under time pressure, pushing them toward customer recovery against their preferences is likely to backfire. If a firm’s only available option is customer recovery, they should consider increasing customers’ sense of autonomy under resource constraints by aligning available recovery options with customer preferences. In contrast, joint recovery can be a win-win strategy—the customer is satisfied and the firm uses only moderate resources. It is also a more robust strategy that works particularly well under resource constraints and regardless of preference matching.