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

For customers, service failures represent a temporary or permanent interruption of the regular service experience. Although past literature has identified an extensive set of organizational responses to recover from service failures, researchers approached these responses as discrete organizational actions that are loosely connected to the dynamic nature of the customer experience. Here, 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, composed of a pre-recovery, recovery and post-recovery phase. Then, we integrate the 22 existing organizational responses to service failures reported in 229 journal articles within the novel SRJ perspective. Lastly, we provide an extensive set of future research questions that expand our knowledge about the service recovery journey and we address the interaction between the customers’ regular journey and the SRJ.