The influence of severity of failure and initial recovery effort on anger, frustration and switching intention - A study of restaurant industry in Ho Chi Minh City of Vietnam

Abstract

With the overall purpose of studying the effect of severity of service failure and initial recovery effort on customers’ negative emotions and switching intention, this thesis used restaurant industry in Ho Chi Minh City as a representative to investigate. Restaurant is a high contact service industry which is connected closely with high service failure rate, so negative emotions plays an important role in mediating service failures and negative responds. Hence, so far, many previous researches had studied about this segment. However, it is necessary to have more researches which can be applied in Vietnamese market. This research suggests that high severity of failure levels results in customers’ negative responds and may partially account for high switching level. When consumers blame the service provider for a severity of failure, they experience anger and frustration which causes their intentions to increasingly switch to the other service provider. A proactive intervention is a quick solution that can reduce anger and decreases intentions to switch, but frustration. It is necessary to enhance the service, which lower severity of failure and increase initial recovery effort in order to reduce negative emotions and keep customers’ loyalty.