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Proposes stimulating future thought and research among service scholars and practicing service marketers as to the relevance of crises and crisis management issues in the service sector.

This article offers the author's perspective of the issues discussed. Eight crisis‐related questions are raised and discussed, with insights from various business leaders also woven into the discussion.

Several themes are addressed, including: crisis‐related issues (including crisis management) should be of particular interest to service organizations; although crises may be linked to specific dates or events, their occurrence is not necessarily random and unpredictable; a proactive approach to crisis management is called for; some organizations (e.g. small and powerless firms) may be more crisis‐prone than others; the term “crisis” means different things to different people and is used in both negative and positive contexts; and when organizations are interconnected with partners or constituencies, it is not always clear who “owns” a crisis – the organization or those affected by it.

To enhance service recovery efforts and ensure service continuity, the article promises to help practicing managers and service providers better understand the nature of crises and how crises might be effectively dealt with in their respective organizations.

The article takes a fresh look at the issues, highlights their particular relevance in the service sector, and includes the perspectives of numerous well‐known business leaders from around the world.

The purpose of this paper is to explore poor service encounters from the customer's perspective.

Multiple autoethnographic accounts of overwhelmingly dreadful customer experiences at a department store were gathered and analyzed. The writers of the accounts were asked only to chronicle their experiences, and not directed to comment specifically on retail employee behaviour. Thus a different approach to dysfunctional service employee behaviour is offered to complement research on service sabotage, internal marketing and service delivery gaps.

Department store customers, especially the younger ones, have very low opinions of retail frontline employees. Common to all the autoethnographic accounts was a cynicism towards the actions of such employees that pervaded the customer perceptions of retail service encounters. Overcoming customer cynicism was identified as a key objective of employee training.

The approach, based on multiple autoethnographic accounts, provides insights that can be overlooked with traditional customer satisfaction surveys. It is particularly useful for eliciting constructive feelings of experiences. By its nature, it can be difficult for researchers to forecast the ground that may be covered by the scribes, and therefore to plan a research project around the method.

The findings are relevant to those involved in training retail frontline employees. They strongly suggest that training, through functional scripts and handy customer service tips, is inappropriate for creating successful service encounters with cynical customers, and may even encourage service sabotage behaviours from severely bored employees.

The methodology is novel in the context of retail customer experiences. The findings bring customer cynicism to the fore, and question the viability of continuing with retail formats that require monotonous and uninspiring roles to be played by retail employees.

Proposes responding to earlier calls for further research into “fraudulent” or “feigned” customer complaints, and providing insights which explore and describe the motivations and forms of such deliberate “illegitimate” customer complaints.

Critical incident technique was utilized in analyzing 104 interviews with customers who had knowingly made an illegitimate complaint within the six months prior to the interview. Data collection stopped at the point of theoretical saturation and was subsequently analyzed according to the coding procedures advocated by Strauss and Corbin (open, axial and selective coding).

Two key insights emerged from data analysis. First, coding procedures revealed four distinct forms of customer complainants. These are labeled; “one‐off complainants”, “opportunistic complainants”, “conditioned complainants”, and “professional complainants”. Second, six main motives for articulating fraudulent complaints were uncovered during data analysis. These are termed; “freeloaders”, “fraudulent returners”, “fault transferors”, “solitary ego gains”, “peer‐induced esteem seekers”, and “disruptive gains”.

The study is constrained by its exploratory design and qualitative methods employed. Subsequently, future studies could employ survey methods to improve empirical generalizability. Future studies could adopt a more inclusive approach and incorporate insights from employees, managers, and other relevant actors within service encounters.

Practical implications highlighted by the study include a need for businesses to examine and, in many cases, reevaluate their personnel training, customer complaint and service recovery procedures. Furthermore, managers may wish to enforce mechanisms wherein customer complaints are monitored and tracked in a manner that assists in the identification and challenging of re‐offending fraudulent complainers.

The study constitutes the first systematic attempt to explore and describe illegitimate customer complaining behaviors.

Explores observable oral participation (OOP) of customers at the front stage of the service delivery system within a retail store setting. Spoken interactions between a customer and a sales assistant are denoted as OOP1, and those between one customer and another as OOP2. The respective front stage roles of customers and sales assistants are examined through an analysis of the content of OOP1 and OOP2 as described by a large sample of customers of a particular store. A process and structure of classification of OOP1 and OOP2 interactions is described and proposed. Results show that, while overall patterns of OOP1 and OOP2 activities are significantly different, the proportion of products‐related interactions for each is very similar. OOP2 interactions were predominantly positive and there is evidence that, for some customers, product‐related conversations with other customers replace or reinforce those with sales assistants. Discusses the actual roles enacted by persons at the front stage in the context of the management of the service encounter.

Observable oral participation (OOP) of customers, in the service delivery system in general and in a store format retail setting in particular, occurs in many forms and frequencies. Focusses on customer‐to‐customer observable oral participation (OOP2), studied in relation to the more frequently researched customer‐employee observable oral participation (OOP1). From a study of the literature, and through a controlled customer survey at a retail store, findings clearly demonstrate customer reliance on person‐to‐person encounters, even in a predominantly self‐service environment, and identify the characteristics of customers more likely to engage in OOP2. Service providers devote little attention to OOP2 (compared to OOP1) in service delivery. However, OOP2 is a form of word‐of‐mouth which can be observed and, therefore, measured and managed, and customers are arguably a neglected human resource for a service organization. With this in mind, discusses implications for service encounter and human resource management.

The authors propose focusing on e‐commerce service failure and recovery through the presentation of failure and recovery strategies employed by e‐commerce service firms.

The authors employ the critical incident technique using 377 customer responses to present ten e‐tail failures and 11 e‐tail recovery strategies used by e‐commerce service firms. The authors also present data on post‐recovery satisfaction levels and propensity to switch behavior.

Findings indicate that: e‐tail customers experience different types of service failure relative to traditional retail settings; e‐tail firms employ a different series of recovery strategies relative to traditional retail settings; and post‐recovery switching by e‐tail customers can be high even with satisfying experiences.

This paper strengthens the existing failure and recovery literature by presenting data on the largest growing sector of the service industry. These findings will have value to traditional firms looking to expand to e‐commerce channels in addition to e‐commerce firms currently experiencing customer dissatisfaction.

This paper is concerned with an exploration of crises within the service sector. The paper proposes setting out a thesis that places “management”, as both a function and a process, at the centre of crisis generation and response rather than simply in terms of “continuity management” or service recovery. The paper argues that the nature of interactions within a service sector context generates significant problems of emergence that, in turn, create vulnerability within organisations. The paper aims to conclude by offering suggestions regarding the various points of intervention that are available to organisations.

The paper explores the nature of crisis with particular reference to the service industries. The paper is conceptual in its scope, although it draws on a number of research‐ and consultancy‐based investigations.

This paper has sought to identify three of the key elements of the crisis management literature: namely vulnerability, emergence and the barriers to learning. Each of these offers quite fundamental challenges to the practice of service recovery by highlighting the need to address both the prevention and response dynamics of the crisis process. The paper outlines the theoretical aspects of failure and outlines the process of vulnerable pathways within organisations.

The conceptual framework needs to be applied to specific cases of crisis in order to validate the framework.

The interdisciplinary approach seeks to outline key issues facing practitioners around the development of contingency plans and the limitations that such plans have embedded within them.

The paper seeks to develop understanding of the nature of vulnerability within organisations and outlines a conceptual framework for the analysis of escalation within organisations.

Concerns the application of novel technology (the TEAMWORKER system) in the measurement of service quality. A performance‐only version of the SERVQUAL instrument was used as a basis, contextualized to suit the fast food industry. The study suggests that the use of computer‐aided interviewing, involving direct data entry by respondents, may have application in the area of service quality measurement. Using this approach, relatively large samples (300 respondents) were gathered in five hours on two occasions in the same area. The study shows low error rates in data capture, and demonstrates the feasibility of the use of such systems within the service arena. It is argued that the resultant data sets, when developed into databases, can be used to provide timely and relevant data on service quality for organizations’ management at all levels.

The paper proposes introducing a new antecedent to service recovery – that is customers' choice over some components of the service delivery process. The authors also examined the interactive effects of tangible compensation and apology on perceived fairness in a context of restaurant services.

A 2 (choice) × 2 (compensation) × 2 (apology) between‐subjects design was used to test the hypotheses. Subjects were exposed to a written scenario describing a restaurant experience. A total of 280 undergraduate students served as the subject pool.

The study results indicate that choice, compensation and apology jointly influence customers' perceptions of informational fairness. The combined effects of apology and compensation were observed for interactional fairness, whereas only main effects were found for distributive justice. Finally, the findings suggest that the four facets of justice (distributive, procedural, interactive, and informational) are highly linked to post‐recovery satisfaction.

Several limitations regarding this research should be kept in mind. First, students served as the sample pool for this investigation. Although the choice of students somewhat limits the generalizability of the results, the behaviors and responses of students and other market segments are likely to be more similar than different in service recovery incidents. Second, the manipulations involved absence and presence of three service recovery attributes (choice/no choice; compensation/no compensation, and apology/no apology). Consequently, different levels of these attributes might produce differential responses.

The findings of this study highlight the benefits of a proactive management of the service recovery process.

This research sheds some light on the role of choice in customer perceptions of service recovery processes. It also introduces a fourth dimension of justice – informational justice – to the service recovery literature.