Question 1--------

Question 2---------

Service Failure and Recovery

Service Failures

Even with the best service organizations, failures can just

happen – they may be due to the service not available when
promised, it may be delivered late or too slowly (some times
too fast??), the outcome may be incorrect or poorly executed,
or employees may be rude or uncaring. All these types
of service failures bring about negative experiences. If left
unfixed they can result in customers leaving, telling others
about the negative experiences or even challenging through
consumer courts. Research has shown that resolving the
problems effectively has a strong impact on the customer
satisfaction, loyalty, and bottom-line performance. Customers
who experience service failures, but are ultimately satisfied
based on recovery efforts by the firm, will be more loyal.
The Recovery Paradox.

It is suggested that customers who are dissatisfied, but

experience a high level of excellent service recovery, may be
more satisfied and more likely to repurchase than are those
who are satisfied at the first place. For example, a hotel
customer who arrives & finds there is no room available. In an
effort to recover, the front-desk person immediately upgrades
this guest to a better room at the same price. The customer is
so thrilled with this compensation that he is extremely
satisfied with this experience, is even more impressed with the
hotel than he was never before, and vows to be loyal into
future. The logical, but not very rational, conclusion is that
companies should plan to disappoint customers so they can
recover &gain even greater loyalty from them as a result. This
idea is known to be as Recovery Paradox. The recovery
paradox is more complex than it seem. First of all it is
expensive to fix mistakes and would appear ridiculous to
encourage service failure-as reliability is the most important
aspect of service quality. According to a research it is
observed that a customer weight their recent experiences
heavily in their decision to buy again. If the experience is
negative, overall feelings about the company will decrease
and repurchase intentions will also reduce. If the recovery
effort is absolutely superlative then the negative impression
can be overcome.

There is a recent study which shows no support to recovery

paradox. It shows the overall satisfaction was consistently
lower for those customers who had experienced a service
failure than for those who had experienced no failure, no
matter what the recovery effort is. The explanation for why no
recovery paradox is suggested by the magnitude of the service
failure in this study it is-a three hour airplane flight delay.
This type of failure may be too much to be overcome by any
recovery effort. Considering mixed opinions on if recovery
paradox exists it is safe to say “doing it right the first time” is
the best and safest strategy. When a failure does occur then
every effort at superior recovery should be made. In cases
where the failure can be fully overcome the failure is less
critical, or the recovery effort is clearly superlative, it may be
possible to observe evidence of the recovery paradox.

How Customers Respond to Service Failure

If customers initiate action following service failure, the

action can be various types. A dissatisfied customer can
choose complaint on the spot to the service provider, giving
the company the opportunity to respond immediately. This is
often the best-case scenario for the company it has the second
chance right at that movement to satisfy the customer, keep
his or her business in the future, and potentially avoids any
negative word of mouth.

Some customer chooses not to complaint directly to the

provider but rather spread negative word of the mouth about
the company to friend, relatives, and coworkers. This negative
word of mouth can be extremely detrimental because it can
reinforce the customer’s feeling of negativism and spread that
negative impression to other as well. Further, the company
has no chance to recover unless the negative word of mouth is
accompanied by a complaint directly to the company.

When there is a failure, customer can respond in a variety of

ways. It is assumed that following are the failure,
dissatisfaction at some levels will occur for the customer. In
fact, research suggest that variety of negative emotion can
occur following service failure, including such feeling as
 anger, discontent, disappointment, self-pity and anxiety. Many
customers are very passive about their dissatisfaction, simply
saying or doing nothing, take action or not, at some point the
customer will decide weather to stay with that provider or
switch to a competitor.

Service Recovery Strategy

When the company fails to stand for its promises made to the
customer on the basis they build expectation, it’s to be said
that there is service failure. When the service failure occurs,
there can be again severe ramification. Customer is
considered to be the bread and butter, hence retaining them is
the biggest challenge, and however service failure acts as an
obstacle to it. In such failures,

 The customer wants what they were promised.

 Customer wants personal attention
 Customer wants a decent apology
 Customers want that they should not be made to feel that they
are the cause of the problem. (Though in many cases they are
responsible for nuisance)
There are again five steps involved in order to deal with
service failure. They are mentioned as below
1. Acknowledgement and apology for the fact.
2. Listening to the customers.
3. Avoid defending the company and offer a rational
explanation.
4. Offer some extra benefits
5. Have a proper follow up and make sure no mistakes this time,
so that he can easily forget about the service failure and is
retained.
A customer expects three shorts of fairness in case of service
recovery. They are mentioned as below.

1. Interaction fairness: when there is service failure, first the

company is supposed to acknowledge the customer. Due to
this the customer might dissatisfied, but he still expects
fairness and courtesy in the language and tone used by the
addresser.
2. Procedure fairness: to know in detail about the incidence of
service failure or to avail the compensation. There should be
simplicity in procedure, which is involved. Service failure and
complexity in procedure both together might result in a
disaster as far as customer is concern.
3. Outcome fairness: now when the company realizes that there
is service failure they should end up compensating, arranging
for some alternative mode of transporting or complies with
the customer condition. The outcome should be taken by
considering the customer, his needs and the company’s policy.
Question 3 --------

Abstract-- Customer satisfaction becomes the most important

factor for business success in most industries. The telecom
mobile companies in Yemen face a problem of decreasing
customers’ satisfaction with their services. Service quality can
provide a good measurement tool to predict customer
satisfaction. However, there is scarcity in studies related to
this field in Yemen that can help telecom mobile companies to
understand and measure the satisfaction level of customers
toward services that provide. Thus, this study aims to analyse
the impact of perceived service quality on customer
satisfaction in Yemeni telecom mobile companies through
finding a valid and reliable instrument to measure customer
perceived service from functional quality and technical
quality perspectives. SERVPERF model is utilized to measure
service quality from functional aspects. Network quality
dimension is newly added to measure service quality from
technical aspects. Six independent variables (tangibles,
reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy and network
quality) are proposed to help predict the customer satisfaction.
The proposed model is empirically tested using appropriate
sampling size. Data collected from 356 respondents through
an online and on-field survey. Using hierarchical regression,
result shows that four dimensions of service quality (network
quality, empathy, reliability and assurance) are revealed
significantly positive impact on customer satisfaction while
tangibles and responsiveness have no impact on customer
satisfaction. The network quality has the highest impact on
customer satisfaction and Yemeni telecom mobile companies
must consider about superior network quality as perceived
service quality from customers to judge the quality of services
in telecom mobile network.
Keywords --Service Quality, Customer Satisfaction,
Telecommunication, Yemen