Breaking The Mold: Redefining Service Failure and Recovery
Yany Grégoire et al.
Abstract
Service failure and recovery (SFR) is one of the most estab- lished areas inservice research. Yet despite the extensive body of knowledge, an alarming trend persists in practice: customers are experiencing more service failures than ever before, and an increasing number remain dissatisfied with the way organiza- tions address their issues (Customer Care Measurement and Consulting 2023). This disconnection between theory and prac- tice underscores the urgent need for what we term smart SFR— research that tackles real-world problems using innovative methods and contemporary theoretical frameworks. The notion of “being smart” reflects the importance of reconsidering “old” ways and encouraging the adoption of up-to-date practices. Recent literature reviews (e.g., Grégoire and Mattila 2021; Liu et al. 2024; Mirza et al. 2025; Van Vaerenbergh et al. 2019) highlight that SFR research often remains rooted in traditional paradigms, focusing on dyadic interactions between firms and complainers, established contexts (e.g., hospitality and bank- ing), traditional theories (e.g., justice and attribution), and familiar methodologies (e.g., scenario-based experiments). We argue that the evolving service landscape demands a smarter approach to SFR—one that ventures into new contexts, lever- ages emerging data sources, and adopts fresh theoretical, meth- odological, and analytical perspectives.
4 citations
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.37 × 0.4 = 0.15 |
| M · momentum | 0.60 × 0.15 = 0.09 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.