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Studies reputation for service quality as a potential moderator of the relationship between a service guarantee and its impact on consumer perceptions of service quality, risk and purchase intent. A before‐after experimental design, set in the hotel industry, was employed to explore the impacts of a service guarantee for an outstanding versus a good service provider. Contrary to what had been implied in the past, the introduction of an explicit guarantee had no negative effect for the outstanding service provider in our study. In fact, the provision of a guarantee marginally improved expected quality, reduced perceived risk, and had no effect on purchase intent. However, for the good quality provider, the impacts were all positive and strong, and apart from the impact on perceived risk, the effects were significantly stronger than those for the outstanding quality provider. Our findings thus support the hypothesized moderating role of service quality.

Investigates consumer perceptions of the utility of service guarantees in a table service restaurant setting. Uses conjoint analysis to determine the utility consumers assign to restaurants that varied along different levels of price, speed of service, quality of food, courtesy of server and service guarantee. The presence of an explicit service guarantee is not uniformly desirable in the selection of a table service restaurant.

To propose a decision support model that can be used to design, implement and communicate effective and efficient service guarantees.

Based on in‐depth interviews by the author and on a recent literature review, the author has looked at different issues regarding service guarantees developed by services companies over the last five years.

The decision support model looks first at 12 key issues to examine before designing a service guarantee. If the preliminary analysis is conclusive, discussion about design and implementation is presented.

The main and original contribution of this model is to present to services marketing managers a step‐by‐step process, including preliminary analysis, marketing communication and performance analysis.

This paper aims to describe the experiences of Australian general insurer AAMI, the first private company to offer a customer charter and draw a comparison between service guarantees and customer charters. The paper also proposes a decision-support framework for the design, implementation and management of an effective customer charter.

The methodology involved in-depth personal interviews and secondary data.

Many service guarantees are not well conceived, implemented, or monitored. The AAMI case, demonstrates how customer charters, originally developed in the public sector can be effectively adopted in private organizations. The customer charter appears to deliver significantly more benefits to customers and an organization than traditional service guarantees. Charters do this by publishing specific service standards based on extensive research, conducting independent audits, stating outcomes of below standard performance, providing a visible and accountable appeal system, and publicly and regularly reporting on performance against promises. An on-going feedback loop ensures continuous quality improvement.

Customer charter findings are based on one case study.

Using a decision-support framework for a customer charter, services may be clearly defined and customer expectations managed building towards an organization-wide commitment to meet service promises.

Customer charters are rare, with little known about how they operate in a private organization. The findings indicate that charters may be more effective as a quality assurance and marketing tool than a service guarantee.

This paper aims to examine the status of service guarantees specifically, and cues to quality more generally.

Reflection on the 1998 Journal of Services Marketing article with views both to the academic literature and the presence of guarantees in industry.

Service guarantees still exist, sometimes in their original form (e.g. “100 per cent satisfaction guaranteed!”) and sometimes in a morphed form (e.g. retailers’ promises of price-matching). Research has continued to focus on understanding service guarantees yet there are additional questions left to be addressed. There are also numerous other types of information, in addition to service guarantees, consumers may use as cues to quality.

Service guarantees remain an important and useful tool for services marketers to signal their quality to their customers and to reduce the uncertainty surrounding many services purchases. Other information such as online ratings and reviews through social media can also serve as strong informational cues.

In providing cues to customers about quality, while marketers have long considered the value of price and brand names, the usefulness of service guarantees is still under-studied.

Although service guarantees are generally believed to give firms a competitive edge, much remains to be learned about the value of, and return on, this customer relationship management strategy. This study aims to examine the influence of implicit service guarantees on two important aspects of business performance: customer satisfaction and return on investment.

The study hypotheses are tested utilizing three different sources of secondary data to assess the study variables.

Over a four-year period, top implicit service guarantee provider firms generated superior market and financial performance in terms of customer satisfaction and return on investment than their industry peers

Research limitations/implications

The number of top implicit service guarantee provider firms used to test the study hypotheses is relatively small due to inherent constraints associated with using secondary data. Testing more exemplar firms against their respective industry averages would have been preferable and may have yielded even more robust findings.

Firms recognized for leveraging customer service skills and resources to “make right” any sources of customer dissatisfaction may achieve positional advantages associated with superior business performance. Therefore, focusing on building a firm's reputation for exceptional customer service provision may be a more effective approach than offering an explicit service guarantee.

This research offers support for contentions that customers value the implicit service guarantees associated with firms recognized for outstanding customer service and responds to calls for research that evaluates the specific information that must be communicated to customers to enhance the credibility and effectiveness of service guarantees.

Empirically evaluates a model of service guarantees by addressing the impact of a service guarantee on consumers’ satisfaction evaluations. Proposes a model suggesting that the differentiating and signaling properties of a guarantee can influence service provider satisfaction and that a service guarantee may capitalize on the coproduction nature of services to increase consumer self‐satisfaction and overall satisfaction. Finds empirical support that a guarantee can influence post‐consumption evaluations, even in the absence of service failure and the guarantee being invoked, and therefore suggests that a service guarantee may influence consumer satisfaction even if the service is already highly reliable.

Introduces a new guarantee type termed “combined guarantee”, which combines the wide scope of the full satisfaction guarantee with the specific performance standards of the attribute‐specific guarantee. Should the consumer be dissatisfied with any element of the service, the full satisfaction coverage of the combined guarantee applies. Specific performance standards are added to communicate minimum performance levels covered by the guarantee, which reduce customer uncertainty about the intended scope of the guarantee. Proposes that such combined guarantees would be superior to the pure designs, as they combine the wide scope of full satisfaction guarantees with the low uncertainty of attribute‐specific guarantees. Two experimental studies were conducted to examine consumers’ perceptions of the alternative guarantee designs. The findings show that the combined guarantee outperformed all other designs and, therefore, demonstrate that firms can design better guarantees than merely promising full satisfaction.

The purpose of this paper is to explore companies' experiences in designing and implementing service guarantees.

The methodology relied on 22 in‐depth personal interviews across a sample of ten Australian service firms.

The effectiveness of a service guarantee depends on how well a firm designs and implements it. It was found that service guarantees were generally not well conceived, implemented, or monitored after launch. Through a comparison of theory and practice, this study identifies a number of common mistakes, including inadequate or non‐existent pre‐launch market research; ambiguous definition of the role of the guarantee; inadequate market testing of alternative guarantee promises; a lack of consultation with key functional managers during development; a lack of CEO commitment; ambiguous assignment of responsibility for ongoing management of the guarantee; and an absence of performance evaluation.

The study employs qualitative research techniques and considers only Australian firms.

While the common mistakes offer cautions for managers when planning a service guarantee, some outstanding examples of successfully implemented service guarantees also emerged. A notable example is the customer charter, a more comprehensive conditional guarantee that avoids many of the pitfalls associated with traditional service guarantees.

Previous studies do not address the experiences of a broad sample of companies that have designed and implemented a service guarantee. The findings in this paper extend the understanding of how service guarantees could become more effective and identify directions for future research.

Many service providers feel confident about their service quality and thus offer service guarantees to their customers. Yet service failures are inevitable. As guarantees can only be invoked when customers report service failures, firms are given the opportunity to redress the original failure potentially influencing customer outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to provide the first empirical investigation of whether excellence in service recovery affects customers’ intentions to invoke a service guarantee, thereby discriminating between conditional and unconditional guarantees and testing for the impact of customers’ individualistic vs collectivistic cultural orientation.

In total, 171 respondents from four continents (spanning 23 countries) were recruited to participate in a quasi-experimental study in a hotel setting. A three-way analysis of variance was used to test the hypotheses.

All customers are very likely to invoke the service guarantee after an unsatisfactory service recovery. When customers are satisfied with the service recovery, they report lower invoke intentions, except for collectivistic individuals who are still inclined to invoke an unconditional service guarantee after a satisfactory service recovery. The finding supports an in-group/out-group rationale, whereby collectivists tend to behave more opportunistically toward out-groups than individualistic customers.

The study highlights the importance of excellence in service recovery, cultural differences and different types of service guarantees with respect to customers’ intentions to invoke the guarantee. The paper demonstrates how service guarantees should be designed in conjunction with service recovery strategies. Also, the paper shows that an unconditional service guarantee creates the condition in which collectivists might engage in opportunistic behavior; global service providers concerned about opportunistic customer claiming behavior thus might benefit from using conditional service guarantees.