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The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether frontline employee empowerment (FEE) is necessary in the presence of streamlined recovery processes when customers attribute responsibility for the recovery process to the service provider.

The hypotheses were tested through a survey conducted with 253 bank customers, combined with two laboratory experiments run with 354 undergraduate students to assess service recovery efforts by an online store and a clinical laboratory.

Customers who attribute more responsibility for the recovery process to service providers only become more satisfied with FEE when recovery processes are not streamlined. The presence of streamlined processes and FEE is not sufficient to raise post-recovery satisfaction levels in individuals who attribute little responsibility for the process to service providers.

The study extends the literature on contingencies that influence the design of recovery strategies by showing when FEE matters. It also highlights the risks of designing service recovery practices, such as FEE or streamlined recovery processes, without considering that different customers do not evaluate such efforts in the same fashion. Research on service recovery design needs to fully integrate concepts from marketing, operations and human resources when the goal is to evaluate the effectiveness of such practices. The outcomes also offer managers insights for designing recovery strategies.