The Impact of Service Failure Severity on Post-Recovery Behavior: The Moderating Role of Gender and Relationship Age

Given that service failures are inevitable in every service contexts, an in-depth understanding of how service failure and recovery affect customer behavior represents a relevant topic for academics as well as for practitioners. This paper explores the role of failure severity in customer's post-recovery repurchase behavior. Using a sample of 40,813 customers, who had experienced a problem with the service provider and who had not, this research empirically tests the proposed framework in the telecommunications sector. The results indicated that service failure severity has a significant influence in customers' post-recovery repurchase. Results also provide support for the moderating role of relationship age. These findings offer several relevant insights for practitioners: it is recommended to avoid severe failures and to use moderators' information in order to enhance customer loyalty and to adopt different service recovery strategies depending upon this segmentation and especially when service recovery paradox is more likely to occur.