Hi! Service recovery is about satisfying customers that are dissatisfied with a "bad performed service". That I do know, but IŽam going to write 2,3 pages about it and are now asking you for help to develop this topic much further. Best regards Erik

-- Erik Forsberg (wizardboy55@yahoo.se), December 05, 2003

Answers

Satisfying customer,in my openion, is not a recovery.However,It may be one of a service recovery factors.When a service organisation fails to fulfil the promises to a customer,one can still be satisfied if offered some refund, replacement or any other kind of compensation but this doesn't mean that customer will come back to that particular service provider. In addition, he/she might start to spread negatibe word of mouth, reduce the frequency of purchase,higher level of complaints and decreased loyalty. Getting customers back to business With no introduction of such elements in their mind is service recovery.

-- mahesh bhandari (bhandarimsl@yahoo.com), February 11, 2004.

A good starting point for understanding service recovery is in both a whitepaper written by Linda Zarate and the storyboard she and I used to outline the paper.

The storyboard is at http://www.tarrani.net/linda/Zarate-Tarrani1.gif and the whitepaper can be downloaded at http://www.tarrani.net/linda/ManagingRecoverydraft.zip

Linda's home page is http://www.tarrani.net/linda/ and other resources both Linda and I have available that include SLM content can be rooted out by starting at http://www.tarrani.com and following the links.

-- MIke Tarrani (mtarrani@pacbell.net), February 11, 2004.

May be defined as "a process of re-instating customer relations after service failure". Failure to satisfy customer in providing appropriate service can be rectified by "service recovery", and a failure to do so ( can we call it "service recovery failure") necessarily means "lost customer"). This apparantly looks to be a "reactive approach" or a sort of "patch work". However a thoroughly planned and implemented strategy with timely proactive customer communication like survey/ feedback/ PPC (planned personal contacts) are said to considerably reduce cost of "service recovery" and enhance "customer satisfaction". To my mind, "service recovery" is a "negative process". Service recovery cost has no direct relation to customer satisfaction. If your service recovery package is highly lucrative some customers would wish always that the there is a service failure so as to claim the recovery package. On the other hand, lower budget for "service recovery" may also enforce weaker communication strategies at customer interface. Yes one should develop standards and methods to react to service failures (service failure response/mitigation plans), but the objective of any organization should be to "reduce service recovery costs" by implementing proactive approach.

-- atul bhatt (abhatt@ibnzahr.sabic.com), August 02, 2004.