Customer Response To Service Recovery In Online Shopping | Poh-Lin Yeoh, Abdolreza Eshghi, Sam W. Woolford & Gul Butaney

This paper investigates the impact of consumers? embedded cultural models on post-recovery satisfaction, loyalty and word-of-mouth (WOM). While consumer response to such failures has been extensively studied, empirical evidence regarding the role of consumers? embedded cultural model, beyond a small-scale qualitative study, is currently lacking in the literature. Furthermore, since service failure likely invokes a sense of injustice we also examined the influence of justice theory dimensions on post recovery satisfaction, loyalty and WOM. We proposed and tested a number of theoretical arguments regarding the main effects of the justice theory elements (distributive, procedural and interactional) and consumers? embedded cultural models (relational, oppositional and utilitarian) as well as the interaction effect between justice elements and cultural models. The results revealed significant relationships between relational and utilitarian cultural types and post recovery loyalty and WOM as well as strong support for the influence of distributive justice, procedural justice and interactional justice on post-recovery satisfaction, loyalty and WOM on an online setting. These findings have managerial implications for the way online retailers manage consumers? post-recovery satisfaction, loyalty and WOM. We hope the new theoretical insights by the interaction effects between justice theory elements and cultural types will guide future research in this area.