Les lauréats du 2ème appel à projet de la Chaire Expérience Client de l’EM Strasbourg Julien Cusin, et Michaël Flacandji sont heureux d’annoncer la publication de l’article "How can organizational tolerance toward frontline employees’ errors help service recovery?" dans Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management [Rang 3 FNEGE, Rang B HCERES] facilitée par le soutien financier de la chaire.
Julien Cusin est Professeur des Universités en management stratégique à l’IAE Bordeaux et Michael Flacandji est maître de conférences en marketing à l’IAE Bordeaux.
L’appel à projet intitulé « Usure et incidents : Comment tenir les promesses de l’expérience client? » visait à mieux comprendre les expériences qui ne se passent pas bien. L’article porte sur les interactions entre clients et personnels de service en contact direct et la tolérance organisationnelle vis-à-vis des erreurs comme facteur facilitant la réparation (recovery).
Abstract
While work on service failures has recently begun to investigate aspects of service recovery systems from an organizational perspective, little attention has been paid to the specific practice of organizational error tolerance in the service marketing literature. One important gap is the lack of an integrated perspective of the outcomes of such a policy on service recovery. The literature also ignores the differences in internal and external perspectives of service failure and their impact on openly communicating the policy. To address this issue, we examined how and under what conditions organizational error tolerance can help improve the experience of customers who encounter service failure caused by frontline employees. We opted for a multilevel qualitative approach in the retail sector, leading to four propositions. After identifying the mechanisms through which an error tolerance policy can generate positive outcomes—within certain limits—for customers in cases of service failure, we argue that such organizational error tolerance conflicts with the demanding attitude of today’s customers, and their negative representation of individual errors. This tension makes it difficult for service providers to reveal their error tolerance policy, giving rise to what we refer to as an ‘informational blind spot’.