The Service Recovery Journey: Conceptualization, Integration, and Directions for Future Research

Service failures represent temporary or permanent interruptions of the customer’s regular service experience. Although the literature identifies an extensive set of organizational alternatives for recovering from service failures, researchers have approached these responses as discrete organizational actions that are loosely connected to the dynamic nature of the recovery experience. In this article, we address this shortcoming by introducing the idea of the service recovery journey (SRJ). We first conceptualize the SRJ as the outcome of a service failure that is composed of three phases: prerecovery, recovery, and postrecovery. We then synthesize the organizational responses to service failures reported in 230 journal articles and integrate them with the novel SRJ perspective. Thereafter, we provide an extensive set of questions for future research that will expand our knowledge about the prerecovery, recovery, and postrecovery phases and address the interaction between the customer’s regular journey and the SRJ. Finally, we outline six considerations for recovery research seeking to affect business practice and discuss the managerial implications of adopting an SRJ perspective.