Buyer behavior · Scenario-based experiments manipulating service failure and recovery characteristics; post-encounter evaluations were measured.
An Experimental Investigation of Customer Reactions to Service Failure and Recovery Encounters: Paradox or Peril?
Journal of Service Research · 1998
Summary
The experiments show that failure/recovery outcomes depend on failure and recovery attributes and customer responses; recovery can improve evaluations, but superior recovery does not uniformly erase the damage of failure.
For your marketing
Possible founder application
Use it as a behavioral mechanism or experiment-design reference, not a direct forecast for a SaaS funnel.
Reported result
What the study found
The experiments show that failure/recovery outcomes depend on failure and recovery attributes and customer responses; recovery can improve evaluations, but superior recovery does not uniformly erase the damage of failure.
Research question
What the authors investigated
How do customers react to service failure and recovery encounters, and when does recovery repair evaluations?
Design
Scenario-based experiments manipulating service failure and recovery characteristics; post-encounter evaluations were measured.
Sample and setting
Consumers responding to hypothetical service-failure/recovery encounters in two experiments.
Scope and transfer
Limitations to keep in view
Scenario experiments provide internal tests of reactions but do not observe actual churn, usage, or real support interactions; external validity to SaaS is therefore untested.
Research sources
SAGE search result describes two experiments and explicitly frames the article as an experimental investigation of failure and recovery encounters. Direct publisher-page retrieval was recorded on 2026-10-09; this profile uses publisher metadata/abstract and does not claim independent review of unavailable full text.