How can organizational tolerance toward frontline employees’ errors help service recovery?

Abstract While work on service failures has recently begun to investigate aspects of service recovery systems from an organizational perspective, little attention has been paid to the specific practice of organizational error tolerance in the service marketing literature. One important gap is the lack of an integrated perspective of the outcomes of such a policy on service recovery. The literature also ignores the differences in internal and external perspectives of service failure and their impact on openly communicating the policy. To address this issue, we examined how and under what conditions organizational error tolerance can help improve the experience of customers who encounter service failure caused by frontline employees. We opted for a multilevel qualitative approach in the retail sector, leading to four propositions. After identifying the mechanisms through which an error tolerance policy can generate positive outcomes—within certain limits—for customers in cases of service failure, we argue that such organizational error tolerance conflicts with the demanding attitude of today’s customers, and their negative representation of individual errors. This tension makes it difficult for service providers to reveal their error tolerance policy, giving rise to what we refer to as an ‘informational blind spot’.