Something old and something new: a replication and extension of the disconfirmation model of consumers' response to service failure and recovery in the contemporary servicescape

Purpose The current work focuses on the disconfirmation model of consumers' response to service failure and recovery established by McCollough et al. (2000) and has two primary objectives: first, we aim to replicate Study 1 reported in McCollough et al. (2000) to test the robustness of the original findings in today's service environment. Second, given the increasing prevalence of service robots in service research and business practice, we aim to extend the original work by exploring potential differences in consumers' response to recovery efforts between traditional service encounters involving human services employees (as in the original study) and service encounters involving service robots. Design/methodology/approach Based on the stimuli from the original study, we conducted a scenario-based experiment in an airline travel context. Responses from 1,101 study participants were used for analyses. Findings Consistent with the findings reported in McCollough et al. (2000), our results indicate that consumers' response to a service failure and subsequent recovery is shaped by initial disconfirmation (i.e. the gap between failure expectations and actual performance) and recovery disconfirmation (i.e. the gap between recovery expectations and perceived response). In addition, the current work extends McCollough et al.'s (2000) findings in several important ways, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of consumers' response to service failure and recovery. Originality/value Apart from providing support for the continued relevance of the findings reported in McCollough et al. (2000), our study contributes to the service failure and recovery literature by identifying differences in consumers' response to recovery efforts depending on whether they are carried out by a human service employee or a service robot. In addition, we introduce consumers' feelings of being appreciated by the service provider – an aspect that has not been previously considered within the service recovery literature – as a mediator of the observed differences.