Customer equity considerations in service recovery: a cross-industry perspective

Service recovery, or "doing things very right the second time" has been ide ntified as a strategic issue in the services marketing and management liter ature. So far much of the research on this phenomenon has departed from the disconfirmation paradigm However since perceptions of fairness play such a n important role in service recovery situations, it seems desirable to supp lement extant literature with the equity paradigm. Therefore, we designed a n experimental study to assess the impact of customer equity considerations on perceived quality, satisfaction, loyalty and trust with respect to serv ice recovery across different service industries Our findings reveal that i n general, distributional fairness and procedural fairness during the servi ce recovery significantly improve scores for service qualify, customer sati sfaction, customer loyalty and trust, whereas interactional fairness only e nhances customer trust Perceptions. Furthermore, our results suggest that t he effects of equity considerations in a service recovery situation are idi osyncratic to specific service industries.