Experience Recovery

What it is

The traditional term, service recovery, describes what a firm does after it fails: the refund, the replacement, the apology. Simmons and DeWitt widen it in two ways. The goal is not only to fix the incident but to restore trust in the relationship, and the means include the stock of goodwill built before the failure, which the book calls the goodwill bank. A recovery, on this account, draws on the account and should end by topping it back up.

It sits in the book's glossary among its other coinages, alongside the goodwill bank, helpfulness as an operating system and the customer's right to reverence. The vault files the book's coinages as the authors' way of thinking about customers, not as findings, and credits the mechanisms underneath them to their own research literatures.

In effect

The trust half of the definition has direct support, and it belongs to one of the authors. Tom DeWitt, Doan Nguyen and Roger Marshall proposed in the Journal of Service Research in 2008 a cognitive appraisal model in which trust and emotions mediate the relationship between perceived justice and loyalty after a recovery. In a hospitality scenario study of 459 people, perceived justice predicted trust and positive emotion, and trust fully mediated the link between justice and loyalty. Restoring trust is what a fair recovery does, on that evidence, and loyalty follows the trust rather than the fairness directly.

The goodwill half has support too. DeWitt and Michael Brady reported four studies in 2003 showing that an existing rapport between customer and service provider raised satisfaction after a failure, raised repatronage intentions and reduced negative word of mouth. Rapport did not make customers more likely to complain.

The limit on banked goodwill comes from Stephen Tax, Stephen Brown and Murali Chandrashekaran in 1998. Satisfaction with complaint handling had a direct impact on trust and commitment, and prior positive experiences mitigated the effects of poor complaint handling only to a limited extent. Goodwill buys patience; it does not stand in for the recovery.

What it does not say

It does not specify what a recovery should contain. For that, the service recovery research sorts the parts into outcome, procedure and treatment, and the evidence on each is set out on the pages for distributive justice, procedural justice and interactional justice.

It does not come with a measure. There is no scale for experience recovery, and the book offers none, so a firm cannot score itself against it.

And it is not the service recovery paradox, the separate claim that a well-recovered failure can leave a customer more satisfied than no failure at all.

How the article treats it

The article on what a customer apology must contain uses experience recovery as a frame and tests it against research the book does not cite. The frame holds that a recovery should fix the problem and restore trust at once. The research supports the second half through DeWitt's own 2008 study, in which perceived fairness after a recovery predicted trust and trust carried the whole of its effect on loyalty, and it supports the cushioning effect of rapport through his 2003 studies. It does not give the frame a unit, and neither does the book. The article therefore keeps the term as the authors' way of thinking and reports the measured parts under their own names, outcome, procedure and treatment. Its reading of the combined evidence is that a recovery depends on trained and trusted staff being in place before the failure arrives, which is a claim about every ordinary day and not only about the day something goes wrong.

---