Description:
Organizations build competitive advantage when they design recovery framework with recourse to disgusted customers, given that no two failure experiences are the same. This paper proposed a framework that links user-involvement to customer satisfaction with five complaint response instruments, and specifically, provides insight into how the relational and interactive effects of personal involvement in service-failure encounters create post-recovery satisfaction. Unstructured and semi-structured interviews were conducted with mobile-telephone subscribers/teachers from Federal Government Colleges (FGCs) in the South-Eastern, Nigeria. The findings show that regularity and significance of felt ordeals, and the service-officer’s willingness to interface with disgusted customers were antecedents of social interactions, socio-economic satisfaction, and positive word-of-mouth. However, the findings affirm the proposed framework, conform to the expectations of socio-emotional selectivity theory, and show that customer characteristics, user-involvement, failure-contexts, and providers’ interface to influence satisfaction with failure/recovery experiences. Based on the decay-time of the effects of recovery instruments, the paper recommended proactive and/or reactive approaches, especially on the recognition that failures driven by low-involvement features demand affective and non-pecuniary recoveries, as well as immediate and cumulative satisfaction; and those driven by high-involvement go for a hybrid of utilitarian and symbolic response interventions.