A review of the service failures and recoveries in food and beverage enterprises

Nourishment has played a significiant role throughout history. Today, nourishment necessity can be met by the food and beverage establishments. Considering this, importance of food and beverage establishment tend to rise day by day. In addition to this, food and beverage establishment falled into disrepute with frequently viewed service failures. Therefore, it is vital for these establishments to develop effective strategies to enable costumers revisit them. For this purpose, service recovery methods was formed with the aim of regaining costumers with regard to after-service behaviours. The main aim of this study is to evaluate the service experience of costumers those encountered a service failure in line with service recovery process. On the other hand, this study has the other aims such as revealing whether costumer behavious show any difference when taking some variables into consideration. To fullfill these aims, a questionnarie was conducted on 1024 participants between the dates of 01.03.2015 and 05.08.2015 who has previously encountered a service failure. In this study, 1 question was directed at participants to determine the service failure encountered. Another 1 question was directed at participants to determine the service recovery strategy implemented. 1 each question was directed at participants to determine for both the service failure magnitude and efficiency of the service recovery. In addition, questions which were prepared for evaluating the service experience of costumers are composed from 4 dimensions named respectively as recovery satisfaction, overall satisfaction, loyalty and word of mouth intention and perceived justice. As a result of this study, findings can be summarized as follows; product defects and facility problems were detected as the most occured service failure types. These kind of service failures were also perceived as the highly severe failure types. Nevertheless, it was found that no recovery action or a low affective recovery strategy was implemented after many highly severe service failure experiences. Besides, it was detected that implementing a highly effective service recovery strategy make a positive difference in terms of costumer behavious. As looking through the behavioral tendencies of costumers, it was found that there is a strong relation between overall satisfaction and loyaly and word of mouth intention. Besides, this study revealed a significiant relation between perceived justice, overall satisfaction and loyalty and word of mouth intention. On the other hand, It was also detected that significiant differences was occured in terms of gender, age, level of income, occupational group, type of food and beverage establishment, aim of benefiting the service, person paying bill, up-to-dateness of service failure experience depending on the evaluation of participants towards the service experience. Finally, some implications were given in accordance with the findings to the food and beverage executives and researcher who will investigate this topic in the upcoming periods.