The role of rapport between customer and service provider on customer satisfaction

In today?s world of marketing, it is known that customer retention is more profitable than attracting new customers. Customer retention requires a continous customer satisfaction, however, it is quite difficult especially in service businesses. Services, by their nature, are open to failures. Companies can use reactive and proactive strategies to mitigate the negative effects of service failures. The current marketing literature is quite limited about proactive strategies while it provides many advices about reactive strategies. This study aimed to explore the effect of previously established rapport relationship between customer and service provider as a proactive strategy for dealing with service failures. Additionally, the effects of financial loss and industry type were invesigated. For this purpose, a 2x2x3 between subjects scenario based experimental design was used to investigate the effects of two level of rapport (absent or present), two levels of financial loss (absent or present) and three different industry types (retailing, beauty and health) on post-failure customer dissatisfaction and satisfaction with service recovery. The study was performed with 526 participants who are the real customers of the industry samples. The findings of the study show that customer-service provider rapport is effective to decrease post-failure dissatisfaction and to increase satisfaction with recovery. The experience of financial loss is not significant for dissatisfaction level while its significant effect on satisfaction with recovery is contrary to the expectation. As the last independent variable, industry type has a partial effect both on post-failure dissatisfaction and satisfaction with recovery.