Service Recovery and Customer Satisfaction Essay

Service Recovery and Customer Satisfaction - Essay Example 316) believe that today’s business contexts are on the verge of a new economic era driven by the experience economy. This piece of research paper explains the relevance of service recovery followed by the service failure and describes different ways to achieve service recovery. The paper also explains how customer satisfaction and financial performance are interrelated and details whether they are always positively related. Service Recovery Strategic service breeds success to many marketers whereas many others fail since their service is inferior to that of others or is less attractive to the customers. Service failure thus provides many dissatisfied customers. As Botha, Strydom and Brink (2005, p. 301), service recovery is a remedial action designed with planned process or strategy of returning an aggrieved or dissatisfied client to a state of satisfaction with the company. Customer satisfaction is perhaps the most critical milestone that almost all marketers target and it is the base for better customer relationship, customer loyalty and even for achieving sustainable competitive advantage. Latest technologies and innovation help marketers differentiate products, and therefore they concentrate on making difference in the service being offered to the customer along with the product. When service fails, service failure is critical to survive in the market. A good service recovery system would be able to increase customer satisfaction, positive word-of-mouth for the company, improve product quality through customer feedback and elimination of costs in marketing and other processes. Service Recovery effort and strategic ways for it Fisk, Grove and John (2007, p. 176- 178) detailed a five-step strategic effort for service recovery. It comprises of apology, urgent reinstatement, empathy, symbolic atonement and follow-up. Almost same process was explained in the work of Botha, Strydom and Brink (2005, p. 301), but with a seven-step strategic cycle, they are 1 ) welcome complaints, 2) give immediate response, 3) treat clients fairly, 4) learn from recovery experience, 5) learn from lost clients and 6) doing it right. Apology with an attitude of welcoming complaints The process of service recovery should begin with an attitude of apology, which is an approach to becoming aware organization’s current situation in regard to dissatisfied customers. Apology is, as denoted by Fisk, Grove and John (2007, p. 176) admitting the failure and this can happen only when the organization has an attitude to accept complaints from customers and others too. Service can be identified and admitted only when the marketer accepts complaints from clients. If client’s complaints aren’t welcome to the firm, it will be fully unaware of how dissatisfied the customers are and why they are so etc. Urgent Reinstatement with immediate response Naturally, a dissatisfied customer would expect immediate response from the marketer and they want to know that some thing will be done by the marketer to remove the source of their disappointment. When the marketer accepts complaints from their customers, he must act as quickly as possible. Botha, Strydom and Brink (2005, p. 301) emphasized that a client will become more dissatisfied when he sees his complaints not listened and responded by