The service recovery paradox: true but overrated?

Purpose – The paper's aim is to test the existence of the service recovery paradox.Design/methodology/approach – To date, much of the literature exploring the service recovery paradox has generated mixed results. The paper argues that a service recovery paradox is a rare event, which makes its measurement difficult, since the “treatment group” sample size is usually too small to produce significant results. For that reason, the existence of the service recovery paradox in a banking context with more than 11,000 customer interviews based on actual customer encounters is tested.Findings – Overall, the survey findings support the argument that a service recovery paradox is a rare event, and the hypothesized mean differences are, albeit significant, not very large, which diminishes their managerial relevance to some degree.Research limitations/implications – Because of the required extremely large sample size, no multi‐item measures were collected. Furthermore, privacy concerns restricted us from a longitudin...