The Effect of Customers' Emotion on Service Recovery Strategy in IT Service Failures

IT service support staff that deals with customer service inquiries online plays a key role in ensuring customer satisfaction and shaping customer experience. In reaction to service failures customers may exhibit some emotions that may influence service support staff’s response. Without a face-to-face interaction with customers, service support cannot detect the emotional signals sent out from customers. Instead service providers must rely on the content of email or online form received to detect any emotional cues. Using data from an issues tracking system, we will empirically test (i) the effect of customer’s emotion encoded in text content on service support staff’s response and (ii) the effect of service recovery strategy on customer’s sentiment on service quality when the service is recovered. Thus, the study will enrich our knowledge in the relationship between customer emotion and service recovery strategy in the context of IT service support.