ASPECTS OF TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT APPLIED IN ...

Annals of the University “Constantin Brâncuşi”of Tg-Jiu, No. 1/2008, Volume 2,
ISSN: 1842-4856
The confirmation and assurance that it will not happen again can be verbal for the second
situations and written for the first one. Also the compensation must be accordingly.
The recent research on service recovery has focused on the level of justice perceived by the
customers in realizing the service recovery strategies.
Perceived justice is seen as the fairness of the resolution procedures, the interpersonal
communications and behaviors, and the positive outcomes.
The fairness of the resolution procedures regards aspects like the delay in processing the
complaint, process control, accessibility, timing, and flexibility to adapt to the customer's recovery
needs.
The interpersonal communicational and behavior focus on the manner in which people are
treated during the complaint handling process including elements such as courtesy exhibited by
personnel, empathy, effort observed in resolving the situation, and the firm's willingness to provide an
explanation as to why the failure occurred.
The positive results focus on the level and nature of apologies and compensations obtained by
the unsatisfied customers.
Acknowledging that, the organizations can find proper methods to determine satisfactory
response to service failures.
Service failure has the potential to have a significant negative impact on organizations.
In tourism, negative word-of-mouth may be a particular cause for concern because of the
importance of personal recommendations.
The excellent service recovery can lead to levels of cumulative satisfaction that are higher than
those existing prior to the service failure. Effective service recovery has also been demonstrated to have
a positive impact on post recovery word-of-mouth.
In conclusion, the beneficial effects of effective service recovery have determined to customers
to express their complaints; these complaints are the only responses that provide the organization with
an opportunity to recover effectively from the service failure.
Although it may seem paradoxical, it could be in the best interest of organizations to encourage
consumer to complain, and then to react appropriately to the complaint behavior.
Conclusions
In my opinion, the services offered in the tourism industry are unlikely to be zero-defect
services. If some service failure is inevitable, then the process of responding to those failures has an
extreme significance in relation to consumers’ future evaluations of an organization.
Service failure takes place when a service fails to live up to what was promised or what the
consumer expected. Because the quality relies in the customers satisfactions, the customer complaints
represent the main indicator of service failure. Unfortunately, not all customers complain (many may
simply decide not to purchase again or may engage in negative word-of-mouth).
An increasing number of organizations encourage customers to complain, because complaints
provide an organization with the opportunity to recover from service failure and, most of all, to prevent
and diminish negative behaviors of the customers.
When an organization is aware of a service failure, a specific service recovery strategy is
essential in order to minimize the negative effects of the initial failure and maximize the positive results
from the recovery process.
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