Deck 13: Fixing Service Failures

Question 1

No matter how the recovery is handled, the original failure is always more important to the company.

Answer 1

False

Question 2

In excellent organizations, servers solicit complaints about their own performance.

Answer 2

True

Question 3

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

Answer 3

False

Question 4

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

Question 5

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

Question 6

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

Question 7

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

Question 8

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

Question 9

An evangelist is created by exceeding expectations.

Question 10

Interactional justice seems to be the most influential.

Question 11

If a server recovers successfully from a system failure, the manager should be informed, even if the guest's problem was resolved.

Question 12

The main reason for empowering servers to provide on-the-spot service recovery is to keep dissatisfied customers from leaving that way.

Question 13

The best way to ensure that someone acts, and acts quickly, following a failure is to empower the front line.

Question 14

Most of the time when service failures occur, the people part of the delivery system has succeeded, but other aspects were unsatisfactory.

Question 15

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

Question 16

A guest failure is a great opportunity for the organization.

Question 17

Putting money and effort into service recovery is good public relations, even if it is not good business.

Question 18

Hospitality organizations should not admit liability for unfortunate, unavoidable occurrences that are not its fault, but they should do everything in their power to rectify such situations.

Question 19

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

Question 20

A service failure is a great opportunity for the organization.

Question 21

An unhappy customer can do any one or a combination of which four things?

A) harass, worry, harm the organization, and bother employees
B) hurt, bother, hate, and complain
C) leave never to return, complaint, retaliate, and bad-mouth the organization
D) complain, retaliate, harm the organization, compliment

Question 22

Yellow and black flags is a system designed for airlines to notice possible service failures and to assign them yellow for caution, possible failure, and black for eminent failure.

Question 23

The percentage of dissatisfied customers who complain is estimated to be about

A) 5-10 percent
B) 10-25 percent
C) 25-50 percent
D) over 50 percent

Question 24

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

Question 25

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

A) just
B) twice
C) three times
D) four times

Question 26

Research suggests that most of the guests who complain

A) are satisfied with the organization's efforts to resolve the complaint
B) eventually become evangelists on behalf of the organization
C) complain again if the problem is not fixed
D) are dissatisfied with the organization's efforts to resolve the complaint

Question 27

If a guest complaint is resolved on the spot, the probability of getting future business from that guest is said to be about

A) 10 percent
B) 30 percent
C) 67 percent
D) 95 percent

Question 28

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.

Question 29

Body language often serves as a method to detect guest satisfaction with a service experience. If the employee can read the dissatisfaction, they can put into place a service recovery plan before the guest finishes the experience and leaves unhappy.

Question 30

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.

Question 31

How the recovery is handled

A) is more important to the guest than the original failure
B) is just as important to the guest as the original failure
C) is not as important as the original failure
D) is unrelated to the original failure

Question 32

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

A) leave never to return
B) complain
C) spread negative word of mouth
D) suffer in silence

Question 33

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.

Question 34

Employees should be encouraged and even rewarded for soliciting and reporting service failures even if they are their own failure.

Question 35

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

A) failures in the service itself, negative employee actions, and unsatisfactory employee response to service failures
B) failures in the product, disappointment with the product, and lack of care
C) lack of focus on the end goal, lack of employee attentiveness, and disinterest in the product
D) failures in the response to service failure, lack of understanding the organizational goals, and failures in the product

Question 36

The company's worst-case scenario is called a/an

A) avenger
B) evangelist
C) complainer
D) fighter

Question 37

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

Question 38

When guests make mistakes themselves like trip over their own feet and fall, it is best to make light of the incident and have a good laugh with them to diffuse the situation.

Question 39

Simply put, service failures are an opportunity for the organization to improve.

Question 40

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.

Question 41

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

A) leave never to return
B) complain
C) spread negative word of mouth
D) suffer in silence

Question 42

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?

A) no charge for the cabana, and free lunch
B) no charge for the cabana, free dinner, free snack
C) no charge for anything else that day, free tickets for another day
D) no charge and a refund for that day, no cabana charge that day, free ice cream for the kids on the way out, free VIP tickets with fast passes for another day at the park, free cabana rental, 5 free games per child and passes to see the characters, and more

Question 43

Which of the following are the four dimensions of justice?

A) judicial, economic, coordinated, and focused
B) procedural, interactional, distributive, and informational
C) economic, personal, interactive, and informational
D) procedural, economic, determinative, and service

Question 44

Chelsea was at the front desk of the Royal Palms Hotel, where she was asked at the end of her stay if her experience was enjoyable. She then complained about the bathroom not being quite up to standard as she walked in. However, when she complained the agent just dismissed her complaint and said, I'm sorry, we will look into that. This is an example of a poor response using ______ justice.

A) equitable
B) distributive
C) procedural
D) interactional

Question 45

Unhappy customers are ______ as likely to pass on negative comments than happy customers are to pass on positive comments.

A) just
B) twice
C) three times
D) five times

Question 46

When something goes wrong in the delivery of a service, it is called a ______.

A) service incident
B) service mistake
C) service failure
D) delivery failure

Question 47

Interactional justice refers to

A) whether or not the customer believes company procedures for handling service failures are fair
B) an assessment by the customer of the fairness associated with whatever compensation he or she received to rectify a service failure
C) the customer's feeling of being treated with respect and courtesy and given the opportunity to express the complaint fully
D) the guest's satisfaction with the adequacy of the information and communication provided by the organization

Question 48

Alberto's New York Sirloin, ordered medium, was brought out overcooked. Unfortunately, this meant he would have to wait for another steak to be cooked and they had tickets to a play. The staff promised they could get the steak out quickly, but when the new steak came out it was extremely rare. The service recovery plan was to simply not charge Alberto for his meal that he never ate. However, they still charged him for his 2 cocktails. This type of justice is

A) equitable
B) distributive
C) procedural
D) interactional