Technology enablers to recover from failures in e-services

  • Authors:
  • Neal G. Shaw;Christopher W. Craighead

  • Affiliations:
  • Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, TX;University of North Carolina at Charlotte

  • Venue:
  • Communications of the ACM - E-services: a cornucopia of digital offerings ushers in the next Net-based evolution
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Although the goal of e-providers should be to provide quality service to all customers at all times, occasional failure is inevitable. Whether the failure is inherent in the content of the e-service (for example, a service that does not meet the expectations of the customer) or in the process (for example, the customer encountered problems with a Web site), the e-provider must be prepared to recover from this failure---a process known as service recovery. Successful service recovery is critical to customer retention and maintaining or possibly increasing customer loyalty [1]. Although service recovery has received a significant amount of attention in the fields of marketing (for example, [2]) and operations management (for example, [3]), the existing concepts must be adapted to the e-service environment. Accordingly, we provide the following seven action items for an e-service provider to remember when it attempts to recover from a service failure: