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Abstract
Recovery-zone-of-tolerance (RZOT) has been introduced to understand the bandwidth of acceptance of service recovery effort initiated by a service provider following a perceived service failure. This study delves deeper into the realms of recovery-zone-of-tolerance to assess the impact of perceived service recovery performance towards identifying tolerance adequacy gap within the recovery-zone-of-tolerance, apprehended to be an antecedent to perceived service recovery impact. Further to this the researcher also aims to explore the mediating effects of recovery-zone-of-tolerance on perceived service recovery performance-tolerance adequacy gap-service recovery impact link. In addition, the study also examines the variation, if any, in service recovery impact across the tolerance adequacy gap. The study was conducted in the context of hospitality and tourism service providers. The results were indicative of the deterministic role of perceived recovery service perception in identifying tolerance adequacy gap and affirmed the mediating effect of recovery-zone-of-tolerance on the variables link.
Key words: recovery-zone-of-tolerance, tolerance-adequacy-gap, tourism, mediating, service, service recovery impact.
(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)
INTRODUCTION
Inherent properties of services embed the seed of service failures which prompt the service firms to initiate service recovery with an objective to arrest possible customer dissatisfaction and migration (Smith and Bolton, 1998; Tax and Brown, 1998) and these failures are detrimental to a firm's sustainability as it may trigger customer defection (Folkes, 1984; Folkes and Kotsos, 1986, Maxham III, 2001) resulting in increase in cost with respect to acquisition of new customers (Hart et al., 1990) and receding profit line (Kelley and Davis, 1994; Smith et al, 1999). These perils compel service providers to initiate service recovery, an attempt to rectify failure in service delivery on technical or other relevant grounds and reassure smooth flow of services to service recipients. Researchers found empirical evidence that effective service recovery may generate higher level of satisfaction (McCollough and Bharadwaj, 1992) popularly phrased as 'recovery-paradox' (McCollough et al., 2000; Smith et al., 1999; Tax et al., 1998) and have also identified customer satisfaction to be a significant determinant to customer retention (CR) (Oliver, 1980; Fornell, 1992; Anderson and Sullivan, 1993, Terblanche, 2006, Hsu, 2008). On the other hand the concept of double deviation effect emphasized on a linear progression of accumulated grievance against a service provider in pre-purchase phase through service failure-recovery...