Neal G. Shaw

Although the goal of e-providers should be to provide quality service to all customers at all times, occasional failure is inevitable. Whether the failure is inherent in the content of the e-service (for example, a service that does not meet the expectations of the customer) or in the process (for example, the customer encountered problems with a Web site), the e-provider must be prepared to recover from this failure---a process known as service recovery. Successful service recovery is critical to customer retention and maintaining or possibly increasing customer loyalty [1]. Although service recovery has received a significant amount of attention in the fields of marketing (for example, [2]) and operations management (for example, [3]), the existing concepts must be adapted to the e-service environment. Accordingly, we provide the following seven action items for an e-service provider to remember when it attempts to recover from a service failure: