Abstract

Since service failure is inevitable in the service industry, how to remedy the failure and maintain customer satisfaction has become an important management issue for enterprises in marketing. This study took gender and physical attractiveness as moderators, hoping to find a mechanism that is more conducive to improving the effectiveness of failure recovery from the perspective of these two variables. In this study, experimental design was used to design a total of 16 experimental scenarios for model verification. The experiment was conducted on a network platform, and a total of 800 valid experimental samples were completed. The study found that for tangible compensation, female service personnel and physical attractiveness are helpful to improve post-recovery satisfaction. In addition, the opposite sex combination of customers and service personnel will produce better remedial effect than the heterosexual combination. Finally, it is also verified that physical attractiveness is an important moderator. The physical attractiveness of the service personnel enables the recovery type and gender combination to have more positive influence on post-recovery satisfaction, thus it plays an important role in failure recovery strategy. Managerial implications for marketing manager of the service industry as well as directions for future research are also discussed.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.