Service failure handling and resilience amongst airlines in Nigeria

Abstract

Organizations build competitive advantage via managing, and learning from, service failure cases. Proficient complaint handling depends on the operator’s strategic position to timely anticipate and respond to customer dynamics in terms of what interests them amidst disgusts. Therefore, this study extends research and theories on complaint management by proposing and testing a theory-driven conceptual framework that captures the proactive initiatives to deal with consumer dynamics. Data collection spans 403 participants in a field survey questionnaire and analysis involved SEM via AMOS 5.0. The results showed that empathy was most critical covariance with agility, followed by compensation and effort effects with anticipatory ability; attentive, facilitation and effort effects with adaptability; and facilitation, attentive and compensation effects with agility. Disgust passengers prefer more of symbolic than utilitarian recovery strategies; thus, we recommend one-on-one marketing activity and hybrid recovery package as critical for reinstating the disgusts.

Keywords

• service failure
• complaint handling
• resilience
• post-recovery satisfaction