Will Lost Customers Come Back? Examining Customers'' Relationship Recovery Intention after Service Failures

• Main Authors: Chun-Yan Shen, 沈春燕
• Other Authors: Perng-Fei Huang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/61753630861616622775

碩士 === 國立高雄第一科技大學 === 行銷與流通管理所 === 97 === Extant research has revealed that an average company loses 10% of its customers each year, and that surprisingly firms can win back defected customers with 20~40% of chance relative to only 5~20% of probability of attracting a new customer. However, both scholars and practitioners have long been ignoring the exploration of how to get lost customers back. The current study, from the perspective of service recovery, was aimed to examine how the customer’s emotional response to firm’s actions for service failure, together with organizational effort and competition force, would influence the customer’s return willingness. We conducted an empirical survey with questionnaires. The sample consisted of 262 consumers who had experienced service failures. LISREL 8.70 was applied for data analyses. SPSS 12.0 was also employed to test the mediating hypothesis. The results include: (1) Customers’ dissatisfaction with no service recovery actions is positively related to customers’ negative emotion. (2) Customers’ dissatisfaction with the distributive quality of service recovery actions is also positively related to customers’ negative emotion. (3) Customers’ dissatisfaction on process and interaction quality of service recovery actions is positively related to customers’ negative emotion, but not significant. (4) The negative relations between customers’ negative emotion and their relationship recovery intention, and between availability of alternatives and customers’ relationship recovery intention, were obtained partial support. Also the positive relation between businesses’ relationship recovery effort and customers’ relationship recovery intention was partially supported. (5) Customers’ negative emotion did not play a significant mediating role in the relationships between customers’ dissatisfaction with businesses’ responses to service failures and customers’ relationship recovery intention. These findings may provide considerable insight into the management of regaining lost customers for researchers and practitioners, and can help businesses to design effective strategies of winning back lost customers. Finally, research and managerial implications based on these findings are presented, and future research directions are identified.