Gaining Customer Compassion During Service Failure through Explanation — An Empirical Investigation

Arun Kumar Tarofder, Sultan Rehman Sherief, Abdullah Nabeel Jalal  
(Faculty of Business Management and Professional Studies, Management and Science University, Malaysia)

Abstract: Delivering error free internet service is one of the utmost important challenges for internet service providers. Despite being natural phenomenon, disruption in internet service has catastrophic outcome for the organizations. One of the main consequences of this unwanted event is customers’ dissatisfaction, which eventually lead brand switching behavior. Generally, organizations provide explanation to their customers during this critical situation. Effectiveness of explanation, however, greatly depends on different methods. Therefore, this study tries to unveil the most effective dimension of explanation, which mitigate customer dissatisfaction in such unwanted situation. Applying simple random sampling from four main internet service providers’ database in Malaysia, this study managed to get 322 respondents, who gave complain about their service disruption during August to October 2014. Factor and regression analysis techniques had been applied to understand the most effective dimension of explanation. Results revealed that excuse has significant negative effect on gaining customer compassion. In contrast, apology become the most effective way of explanation followed by reference and justification during service failure. Indeed, this study is one of the limited literatures that provides deeper understanding of explanation in gaining customer compassion and eventually helps service industry to rethink their customer service strategies in gaining customer compassion, which ultimately keep their customer forever with them.

Key words: service failure; explanation; excuse; apology; internet service

JEL codes: M