RESTORECOV: A study on service recovery dimensions in fast-food restaurants in Metro Manila

• Main Authors: Ang, Kyle Matthew D., Bolaños, Jullianne Alberta L., See, Bryan David L., Zhuang, Shi Long H.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2023
• Subjects: Restaurants—Customer services; Restaurants—Quality control; Service industries—Quality control; Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etdb_induseng/19; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/context/etdb_induseng/article/1028/viewcontent/RESTORECOV__A_study_on_service_recovery_dimensions_in_fast_food_r_Redacted.pdf
• Institution: De La Salle University

The fast-food industry is characterized as a service and people-oriented, high-growth industry, providing sufficient justification for research to be conducted in this field. Related literature emphasizes the consequential threats posed by service failures, as well as the evidence on the benefits of appropriately responding to these failures with the proper recovery strategy, serving as the basis for this study’s focus. Furthermore, the existing literature and service recovery measurement tools in this area of study failed to account for aspects that may be of significance in the fast-food restaurant industry such as service failure typology and severity. Thus, it is imperative for this study to determine the significant dimensions of service recovery in the fast-food restaurant industry with failure typology and severity considerations with regards to recovery satisfaction. The initial list of service recovery failures and dimensions was obtained from related literature, and was subjected to a focus group discussion with fast-food restaurant managers and fast-food customers in order to perform alterations to the list and assign the appropriate strategies to the significant failures. With this, a questionnaire was developed based on related studies and inputs from the managers. Participants of the survey were expected to grade their previous service failure and subsequent recovery experience with a Likert scale of 1 to 5, consisting of items about the severity of the failure, recovery dimensions, and satisfaction after the failure. Statistical screening was conducted through a confirmatory factor analysis using the SPSS Amos software, involving data from a total of 465 respondents that were statistically tested for validity and reliability. Not all recovery strategies were found to significantly affect recovery satisfaction and those found significant are supported by extant literature. From this, three recovery strategies were unassigned from corresponding service failures (e.g., “willingness to listen” from “wrong/lacking order”, “effort” from “slow service”, and “delayed monetary compensation” from “dish defect”) provided that only strategies capable of affecting customer satisfaction are to be included in the tool. The most significant strategies are “apology” in “out of stock” and “slow service”, “new/replacement goods” in “wrong/lacking order”, “courtesy” in “inappropriate server behavior”, and “effort” for “dish defect” where these tend to be strongly related to aspects of interpersonal communication, as customers perceive human interaction as the most critical component of recovery after a failure encounter. The final set of significant service recovery strategies per service failure affecting recovery satisfaction are as follows: “dish defect” includes “apology”, “courtesy”, willingness to listen”, “new/replacement goods”, and “effort”; “slow service” includes “apology”, “courtesy”, and “initiation”; “out of stock” includes “apology”, “courtesy”, and “flexibility”; “inappropriate server behavior” includes “apology”, “courtesy”, willingness to listen”, “facilitation”, and “delayed monetary compensation”; “wrong/lacking order” includes “apology”, “courtesy”, “willingness to listen”, and “new/replacement goods”. Ultimately, the findings of this study were configured into a service recovery strategy measurement instrument: RESTORECOV. The properties and functions of the tool are as follows: computation and ranking of recovery satisfaction and severity rating per failure type, computation of recovery strategy score per failure type, pass or fail indication of recovery strategy score per failure type based on standard set, improvement prioritization of failed recovery strategies, and recommendation provision for each failed recovery strategy per failure type. RESTORECOV is to be used by fast food restaurants in order to assess their service recovery capability in terms of recovery satisfaction. This will allow restaurant management to perform the necessary adjustments to improve their response, ensuring that consumers are satisfied with the service recovery provided.