외식서비스 회복공정성, 만족과 충성도간의 구조적 관계

Abstract

Service failure in foodservice industry inevitably arises due to the inherent people-dependent nature of service. Providing "zero ?Cdefect" service is almost impossible. Service failures not only result in disgruntled customers but also lead to discontinuing patronage. Therefore, thorough detection and well-executed recoveries are essential for service firms to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty. Service failure refers to any service related mishap, either actual or perceived, during a customer's experience with a firm. Service failures have long been an interesting topic to restaurant researchers and practitioners. However such research did not consider a number of relevant variables those are existing outside of the failure-recovery encounter. This research undertake a more holistic examination of food service failure-recovery process by incorporating the role of switching barriers. The purpose of this study is to examine the switching barriers as the moderating variables in the food service failure-recovery context and the structural relationship among service recovery justice perception, satisfaction and loyalty of food service customer. Some scholars argue that switching barriers, as the key moderating variables, can significantly influence customer loyalty through such determinants as customer satisfaction. And also researchers argue that the moderating effect of switching costs on customer loyalty is contingent on situational variables such as the types of businesses, customers, and products, and may not always be significant. To reach this purpose, this research has used critical incident technique(CIT) to identify common service failures in Korean food service. Since service failures are determined by the customer's point of view, critical incident technique(CIT) are useful to identify common service failures for direct management application. The customer who have complained to the restaurant were selected and surveyed. The pilot survey was operated Jun. 30th∥Jul. 14th, 2010 and data was collected from Oct. 4th∥Oct. 24th, 2011. The proportional quota sampling are adopted to represent the major characteristics of the population by sampling a proportional amount of each region of Korea. Total 1059 questionnaires were collected and 1009 questionnaires were used for empirical analysis. AMOS(ver. 16.0) and SPSS program were employed to analyze structural relationship among factors. The findings and implications can be summarized as follow: In terms of practice, my results support the importance of satisfaction through justice perception in the recovery process. Consistent with prior research, customer satisfaction through the systematic management of service failures, including appropriate compensation and sympathetic attitude, is essential for service firms to enhance customer loyalty. Moreover the fact that switching cost and relationship quality serve as a moderator in good relationship quality group and high switching cost group. This result has both theoretical and managerial implications. Theoretically, above all, these moderating effects of relationship quality and switching cost have not been uncovered by previous foodservice studies. The details are below. First, as results of exploratory analysis on factors of the service recovery justice perception, each of the variables was divided with three dimension factors(distributive justice, procedural justice and interpersonal justice). Second, the each dimension of the perceived recovery justice had positive effects on the satisfaction. And as results of comparison among the justice factors on the satisfaction, the biggest impact on the satisfaction was the distributive justice. Third, as results of verification of the moderating effect of switching barriers on the each path that is perceived justice dimension to satisfaction and satisfaction to loyalty, the relationship quality and switching cost had moderating effects between the satisfaction and loyalty after recovery, but on the other hand, attractiveness of alternative had no moderating effect between the satisfaction and loyalty. Thus, the finding adds incremental knowledge to marketing by providing empirical evidence to a question theoretically unanswered and vital in the rapidly developed foodservice market. Managerially, under a competitive foodservice business environment, managers should focus on improving recovery justice perception and customer satisfaction. First if the firm set up good relationship with their loyal customer, customer would be tolerant of unexpected service failure. Second, adopting a bonus program for frequent customer is a good marketing mix for who perceived cost benefit high. Third, attractiveness of alternative is not working as a moderator, which is hopeful result for restaurant practitioner. Because attractiveness of alternative is out of firm's control. This study tries to get customer perception on the service recovery through critical incident technic and structural equation modeling. But this is the initial try to examine the moderating role of switching barriers in foodservice. Especially switching cost factor is not fit tightly in restaurant context. Developing variables just for foodservice is required to the future study.