Proposing and validating a knowledge-based model of service recovery impact on employee and customer behaviour

Research has shown that service recovery is critically important from a managerial perspective in terms of maintaining customer relationships. Yet few firms excel at handling service failures. There is a growing number of managers who claim that customers tend to be dissatisfied with their service recovery effort. To address these criticisms, complaint management must acknowledge and find new approaches to achieve consistency and to correct the misalignment of interests that can exist between the actions of the organisation and the needs of its customers and employees. Drawing upon the knowledge based view, a comprehensive model is constructed in terms of input, process, and outcome in an attempt to understand the relationships between firm characteristics, knowledge based resources, complaint handling and the resulting outcomes.