Abstract:

"Immediate recovery” has become one of the most important way for customer complaints handling and is even taken by the firms as the general pattern for customer relationship management practice. However, through massive consumer information feedback and enterprise practice, it was found that after experiencing failure of“immediate recovery ”, some enterprises gave up the management of customer complaints, which resulted in the loss of a certain size of customers. The main problem is the inappropriate timing for “immediate recovering”. Therefore, this paper first proposed in the field of service recovery “delay recovery” concept and introduced it into marketing research, and constructed theoretical model of “recovery timing and recovery strategies” two-dimensional decision matrix influence on fairness perception of complaint customers. The research mainly used the method of simulation circumstances experiment. The results show that the different combinations of “recovery timing and recovery strategies led to significant differences in fairness perception and recovery performance evaluation of complaint customers.

Key words: Recovery timing, Recovery strategies, Complaints handling, Fairness perception, Recovery performance