Toward Optimal Symbolic Recovery: Comparing “Thank you” and “Sorry” in Addressing Service Delays

Service delay, or unexpected delay after a service has been scheduled (Taylor 1994), is the most common type of service failure (Goodwin and Ross 1992). Unlike product failure that usually requires utilitarian recovery efforts to alleviate the “financial pain” felt by consumers (Dunn and Dahl 2012researchers have found that consumers feel better about the product failure after complaining about it. In contrast, the authors show that when consumers are to blame for product failure, complaining has a \”detrimental effect on consumer reactions to the product. In this context, self-threat from the product failure is shown to motivate defensive processing in both the content of complaints and the subsequent downstream product evaluations. The authors establish the role of self-threat in product failure in two ways: (1), service delay is a typical process failure in which marketers could strategically employ symbolic recovery efforts to ease consumers’ “psychological pain” (e.g., feeling of not being respected). According to the sociometer theory of self-esteem, people’s feelings about themselves are affected by the extent to which they believe other people have accepted or rejected them (Leary et al. 1995, 1998). As consumers perceive an unscheduled delay as a signal of the marketer’s lack of attention to their interest and lack of effort in protecting their welfare (Seiders and Berry 1998)financial institutions, and financial elites gain greater influence over economic policy and economic outcomes. Financialization transforms the functioning of economic systems at both the macro and micro levels. Its principal impacts are to (1, their self-esteem is threatened. Therefore, “what to say” to customers after service delays is especially important for marketers to repair consumers’ thwarted self-esteem and restore their satisfaction.