Online Service Failure and Recovery in Chinese Online Setting.

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to provide an understanding of consumers' evaluation of online complaint handling programs, its impact on post-recovery behaviors and implications for customer relationship management. This master thesis extends previous work by incorporating informational justice into the conceptual framework and investigating how consumers assess fairness in the online environment. A four-justice-dimension framework (distributive, procedural, interactional and informational justice) is used to test the effects of justice perception on post-recover satisfaction and overall firm satisfaction. To test the hypotheses, a mixed-design experiment was employed. The results show that distributive, procedural and interactional justice are strongly related to satisfaction with recovery while only two justice dimensions (distributive and interactional justice) have great influences on overall firm satisfaction. The interaction between distributive and interactional justice is a strong predictor of satisfaction with recovery, whereas, the interaction between distributive and informational justice is significant for both satisfaction with recovery and overall firm satisfaction. Satisfaction with recovery has a positive impact on repurchase intent and a negative effect on negative word-of-mouth intent. However, overall firm satisfaction has a stronger influence on repurchase intent and negative word-of-mouth intent than satisfaction with recovery.