Exam 13: Fixing Service Failures

Service failures can be turned into service wows due to a positive service recovery and eventually those guests could be turned into evangelists.

What matters to guests is to receive a fair settlement for a service failure, even if the organization makes the settlement reluctantly.

What are the three most common critical incidents during service encounters, which cause customers to switch to other services?

Organizations should not encourage complaints, but once they receive them treat them as opportunities to improve service.

Research shows that more than half of organizational efforts to respond to consumer complaints make things better.

A dissatisfied guest can do any of the following. From the organization's perspective, which is BEST?

How the recovery is handled

The complaint process should be complex and possibly a little difficult to use because there are different types of justice people seek and even more types of service failures that could occur, and each is perceived differently by guests.

Elizabeth is at an amusement park with her eight grandchildren ages 1 1/2 to 13. She rented a specific cabana by their favorite water park ride and the locker rooms for ease of access to the changing station. Unfortunately, an employee rented out that cabana to another guest who showed up that day. The only other cabana was away from the locker rooms, but offered more shade. Elizabeth was not happy. Later that day, as the children were eating lunch in the cabana a squirrel aggravated a bee's nest right next to the cabana, and Elizabeth and all her grandchildren were stung multiple times. Which of the following would be an equitable recovery strategy for this service failure?

The unhappier a customer is about a specific experience, the less likely they are to tell other people and more likely they are to complain to the organization directly to obtain a comp or resolution.

The zone of tolerance is the allowable minor service failures that still result in a guest's experience being a positive one.

Satisfaction with service recovery efforts decreases as the amount of time it takes to provide a resolution increases.

The "wow" word of mouth can be just as valuable or even more valuable than negative word of mouth because it can be used as testimonials on the company's website.

If the cost of failure to the guest is high, fixing the problem quickly is especially important.

Fixing a service failure before the guest leaves is the best way to diminish the negative impact and prevent the loss of the customer forever.

The best failure is one that is discovered before it happens.

Unhappy customers are ______ as likely to spread negative word of mouth as happy ones are to spread positive word of mouth.

A guest failure is a great opportunity for the organization.

If a restaurant serves a meal that the guest finds unsatisfactory, replacing the meal is a good recovery strategy.

A guest's body language can indicate a service failure.