Applying Signaling Game to Build a Service Recovery Mechanism

• Main Authors: Shu-Yu Yeh, 葉書羽
• Other Authors: Yen-Hao Hsieh
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/49x8fj

碩士 === 淡江大學 === 資訊管理學系碩士班 === 102 === In the era of service economy, service providers easily interact with customers during service delivery. Owing to the heterogeneity of services, it is difficult for service providers to specify and standardize the service design and delivery processes. Hence, services could not meet customers’ needs and expectations which result in service failures and customer dissatisfaction. Traditionally, service providers have a standard service recovery process and do their best to remedy mistakes for customers when service providers encounter different kinds of service failures. However, service providers usually can’t carefully concern about the controlled levels of existing resources. In order to achieve high customer satisfaction, service providers always take a lot of effort to remedy service failures even though they are lack of sufficient resources. Meanwhile, service failures could be result from many causes including service quality, levels of service complexity and personality traits etc. Service providers have to take these critical factors into account for service recovery rather than only taking lots of resources. The most important factor is personality traits to influence the success of service recovery. Accordingly, this study aims to understand the customer responses and actions when customers encounter service failures that belong to different personality traits. This study builds a mechanism of service recovery to help service providers to make the optimal strategy by considering their controlled levels of existing resources to achieve the success of service recovery. This study attempts to build a mechanism of service recovery based on the signaling game theory including service providers and customers. This study designs the parameters of payoffs of the signaling game based mechanism by reviewing critical literatures and interviewing two senior hotel managers. In order to understand the actual service recovery situations, this study analyzes the customer feedback and past experiences of perceiving hotel services via the website of TripAdvisor. Based on the analysis, this study defines four scenarios of service recovery including separating equilibrium： extraversion customers with complaints─neuroticism customers without complaints, separating equilibrium： extraversion customers without complaints─neuroticism customers with complaints, pooling equilibrium： extraversion customers with complaints─neuroticism customers with complaints and extraversion customers without complaints─neuroticism customers without complaints. Hence, this study applies the four scenarios to carefully infer and build four signaling game models. The real data which is collected from interviews and literatures reviews can be inputted to the proposed models in order to evaluate the feasibility and the accuracy of the mechanism of service recovery. The equilibrium of the payoff for each model can be also explored. In other words, the mechanism is taken service providers and customers into account to find out the optimal strategies and actions. The research findings include 1) customers’ effort, time and reputation can influence their intention to complain about service failures 2) the service recovery strategies should be dynamically responded to different personality traits of customers 3) service providers have to employ suitable service recovery execution within four scenarios 4) the payoffs of service providers and customers could be diverse based on their strategies and actions 5) customers with complaints can be satisfied with the quality service recovery. Besides, the research contributions of this study are detailed as follows 1) this study tries to design the mechanism of service recovery in an innovative perspective 2) the mechanism of service recovery is considered two roles of service providers and customers 3) the practical analysis revels that different personality traits of customers enable service providers to select suitable service recovery strategies. The practical contributions of this study include 1) the mechanism of service recovery help service providers to effectively use resources to remedy service failures 2) the mechanism of service recovery help customers to acquire proper services to improve service failures 3) the mechanism of service recovery increase the success of service recovery. There are several research limitations including 1) this study only focuses on extraversion and neuroticism customers 2) this study applies five parameters to represent the payoffs of the mechanism of service recovery 3) this study defines several scenarios and assumptions to infer the signaling game models in order to clarify the research boundary. In the future, researchers can continuously adopt other models of game theory to the field of service recovery and design suitable service recovery strategies for service providers to remedy service failures. The applications of successful practical cases of service recovery should be also a research direction for the field of service science.