Service guarantee redress options in a hotel environment

Unconditional service guarantees are a popular marketing tool in the hotel industry worldwide. They promise total satisfaction and guests are free to invoke the guarantee whenever they are dissatisfied. While many hotels offer “money-back” compensation following guarantee invocation, others vary the payout depending on the severity of the service failure and still others will only compensate the customer if the problem leading to invocation of the guarantee cannot be fixed. To the researcher’s knowledge, the influence of compensation and fix (i.e., taking action to resolve the problem) on consumers’ perceptions of distributive justice has not been examined previously in a service guarantee context. This paper begins to address this gap by presenting a conceptual model and related propositions, arguing that redress (compensation and fix) is an important predictor of consumers’ perceptions of distributive justice, and that this relationship is moderated by service failure severity.

Service recovery in a service guarantee context

This study employed a 2 x 2 full-factorial, between-subjects design experiment examining the influence of service failure severity and fix on hotel guests’ satisfaction following invocation of a service guarantee. The study involved a sample of 130 online panel members. As expected, guests are less dissatisfied following a minor (versus a major) service failure while satisfaction is enhanced when the problem is corrected. Surprisingly, fix has a stronger influence on satisfaction when a severe failure occurs, and satisfaction evaluations are approximately equal regardless of the severity of the failure when the problem is fixed.

The influence of failure severity and perceived employee effort on consumers' postcomplaint negative WOM intentions in a service guarantee context

This study employed a 2 x 2 full-factorial, between-subjects design experiment examining the influence of failure severity and perceived employee effort on hotel guests’ negative word-ofmouth (WOM) intentions following invocation of a service guarantee. The study involved a sample of 131 online panel members. Results suggest that negative WOM intentions reduced when a greater level of effort is exerted by staff in rectifying the guest’s problem and increased when a more severe failure is experienced. There is a stronger difference in guests’ negative WOM intentions between the high and low employee effort conditions when a minor versus a severe service failure is experienced by guests.

Justice-based service recovery in a service guarantee context

Although many service organisations have committed resources to developing service guarantee programmes, empirical research assessing their influence of consumers' post purchase evaluations is limited. This thesis addresses this deficiency in the guarantee literature by adapting and extending an established model of perceived justice and consumer satisfactionto the service guarantee context.

Who chose this restaurant anyway? The effect of responsibility for choice, guarantees and failure stability on customer complaining

Customers often behave in the context of a group, with different behavior occurring in this context to that which transpires in an individual context. However, customer complaining behavior (CCB), including voice, negative word of mouth, in addition to that transmitted electronically, and exit, in a group setting has not been studied previously. A service failure during a group celebration at a restaurant and the pattern of CCB that ensues is examined. This is based on customers’ level of responsibility in restaurant selection on behalf of the group, the presence of an unconditional service guarantee, and the perceived stability of the failure. Findings suggest that customers are more inclined to exit when they have participated to a greater degree in choice and that the presence of an unconditional guarantee interacts with participation to influence negative word of mouth intentions. Perceived failure stability had the greatest influence on CCB.

The influence of guarantee compensation and fix on service recovery

This study employed a 3 x 2 full-factorial, between-subjects design experiment examining the influence of service guarantee compensation and fix on hotel guests’ satisfaction following invocation of a service guarantee. The study involved a sample of 390 online panel members. As expected, satisfaction is enhanced when the problem is corrected, however overcompensating guests beyond what was initially promised does not enhance satisfaction evaluations. Increasing compensation from the low to the medium (promised) level results in stronger satisfaction ratings when the problem is fixed versus when it is not.

There's a fly in my soup : the influence of service guarantees and personal requests on customer voice

Anecdotal evidence suggests that service guarantees and personal requests by service workers encourage customers to voice following failure. However, empirical support for these tactics in facilitating complaints to the organisation is limited. To address this deficiency, a 3 (guarantee treatment: none, unconditional or combined) x 2 (personal request to voice: yes or no) x 2 (failure severity: minor or major) full factorial, between subjects experiment was conducted in a restaurant context. Findings suggest that offering a service guarantee, regardless of whether it is unconditional or combined, can encourage voice. Severity of the failure was also found to be associated with voice. Surprisingly, however, a personal request to voice was not related to customers’ voice intentions. Implications of the findings are discussed.

Service guarantees and customer satisfaction: an empirical study of guarantee type and service experience

Scenario analysis was used to examine empirically the relationships between guarantee type and service experience, and consumer satisfaction, for the service of an Internet Service Provider (ISP). The scenarios involved hypothetical situations in which several factors were varied: the existence of a problem; the invocation of a guarantee, the identity of the invoker; and the manner of resolution of any problem. Alternative service guarantees were associated with each hypothetical experience: a specific guarantee, and an unconditional guarantee. Overall, consumer satisfaction related to the nature of the service experience much more strongly than it did to the difference in guarantee type.

Service failure and recovery in the presence of service guarantees

This paper presents a conceptual model and propositions outlining how, in a service recovery encounter, service guarantees (unconditional and specific) operate in conjunction with other organisational recovery variables (guarantee facilitation and service provider concern), to influence customers’ justice perceptions and subsequent satisfaction evaluations.

Energy efficient sleep schedule with service coverage guarantee in wireless sensor networks

Service oriented architecture has been proposed to support collaborations among distributed wireless sensor network (WSN) applications in an open dynamic environment. However, WSNs are resource constraint, and have limited computation abilities, limited communication bandwidth and especially limited energy. Fortunately, sensor nodes in WSNs are usually deployed redundantly, which brings the opportunity to adopt a sleep schedule for balanced energy consumption to extend the network lifetime. Due to miniaturization and energy efficiency, one sensor node can integrate several sense units and support a variety of services. Traditional sleep schedule considers only the constraints from the sensor nodes, can be categorized to a one-layer (i.e., node layer) issue. The service oriented WSNs should resolve the energy optimization issue considering the two-layer constraints, i.e., the sensor nodes layer and service layer. Then, the one-layer energy optimization scheme in previous work is not applicable for service oriented WSNs. Hence, in this paper we propose a sleep schedule with a service coverage guarantee in WSNs. Firstly, by considering the redundancy degree on both the service level and the node level, we can get an accurate redundancy degree of one sensor node. Then, we can adopt fuzzy logic to integrate the redundancy degree, reliability and energy to get a sleep factor. Based on the sleep factor, we furthermore propose the sleep mechanism. The case study and simulation evaluations illustrate the capability of our proposed approach.

Converged network-cloud service composition with end-to-end performance guarantee

The crucial role of networking in Cloud computing calls for federated management of both computing and networkin resources for end-To-end service provisioning. Application of the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) in both Cloud computing an networking enables a convergence of network and Cloud service provisioning. One of the key challenges to high performanc converged network-Cloud service provisioning lies in composition of network and Cloud services with end-To-end performanc guarantee. In this paper, we propose a QoS-Aware service composition approach to tackling this challenging issue. We first present system model for network-Cloud service composition and formulate the service composition problem as a variant of Multi-Constraine Optimal Path (MCOP) problem. We then propose an approximation algorithm to solve the problem and give theoretical analysis o properties of the algorithm to show its effectiveness and efficiency for QoS-Aware network-Cloud service composition. Performanc of the proposed algorithm is evaluated through extensive experiments and the obtained results indicate that the proposed metho achieves better performance in service composition than the best current MCOP approaches Service (QoS).