Customer intentions to invoke service guarantees: Do excellence in service recovery, type of guarantee and cultural orientation matter?

Purpose – Many service providers feel confident about their service quality and thus offer service guarantees to their customers. Yet service failures are inevitable. As guarantees can only be invoked when customers report service failures, firms are given the opportunity to redress the original failure potentially influencing customer outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to provide the first empirical investigation of whether excellence in service recovery affects customers’ intentions to invoke a service guarantee, thereby discriminating between conditional and unconditional guarantees and testing for the impact of customers’ individualistic vs collectivistic cultural orientation. Design/methodology/approach – In total, 171 respondents from four continents (spanning 23 countries) were recruited to participate in a quasi-experimental study in a hotel setting. A three-way analysis of variance was used to test the hypotheses. Findings – All customers are very likely to invoke the service guarantee after ...