The journey from customer participation in service failure to co-creation in service recovery

Customer participation is growing into a widespread phenomenon in the service context. Despite the inherent significance of customer expectations to service failures in the high-participation service context, scant research exists on studying the links among customer participation, customer expectation of service recovery, and service outcomes (e.g., word-of-mouth or WOM). Even more pressing is the lack of research on the type of service recovery that can countervail the inflated customer expectation of service recovery and restore service outcomes. This research demonstrates that high contribution of customers in the beginning of service provision procedure leads to high recovery expectations and low satisfaction. The results also support that co-created service recovery (CCS-R), as contrasted to firm and customer recoveries, has a greater positive effect on satisfaction. Further, the contrasting impacts of each service recovery type on positive and negative WOM are presented. An experiment was conducted using service failure and recovery scenarios. Regression analysis was used to test the hypotheses. The current research has some important implications for scholars and managers who wish to effectively recover failed high-participation service encounters.