Trust Recovery Following a Double Deviation

Although double deviation (i.e., unsatisfactory service recovery) is an acknowledged phenomenon in the field of marketing, little attention has been devoted to determining what actions firms can take to restore consumer trust in the wake of such an event. Across four experimental studies of different populations and service sectors, we show that double deviation intensifies the trust violation generated by the initial service failure and that recovery from double deviations requires fundamentally different strategies than recovery from single deviations. Our results suggest that financial compensation is not an especially effective strategy for double deviations compared to the effectiveness of apologies and promises that the problem will not occur in the future. However, it is important for firms to match the type of double deviation to the recovery strategy, with apologies being more effective for integrity violations and promises being more effective for competence violations.