Perceived Control and Perceived Risk in Self-service Technology Recovery

The widespread use of self-service technology (SST) has changed the way customers experience service and how they deal with recovery from service failure. A growing number of service providers offer SST-based recovery, allowing customers to fix service failures using SSTs. Yet, gaining customer acceptance for this emerging form of service recovery presents challenges. There is a need to improve current understanding of the factors that influence customer decisions to use SST for failure recovery. Drawing on control theory, we examine the role of customer perceptions of control and risk in determining intention toward SST-based recovery. We provide empirical evidence that perceived control and risk over SST-based recovery significantly influence the intention to use SST-based recovery. Additionally, we find that whilst perceived risk of SST-based recovery mediates the effect of perceived control on usage intention, personal control moderates the relationship between perceived risk and intention to use SST-based recovery.