The critical role of customer forgiveness in successful service recovery

Service failures occur when the service provided is less than adequate or fails to live up to the customer's expectations. When service failures inevitably occur, providers implement recovery strategies such as apologizing, offering compensation, or allowing customers to voice their concerns. However, such strategies do not always lead to desired outcomes such as repatronage intentions, reduced negative WOM, or reconciliation. The current research explores the very rich concept of forgiveness with regard to service recovery and empirically examines the links among recovery strategies, customer forgiveness and recovery outcomes. Although differences in terms of optimal recovery strategies depend on industry type, forgiveness is demonstrated to mediate the relationship between recovery strategies and desirable outcomes, suggesting that forgiveness be included in all future models of service recovery.