What Goes around Comes around: The Impact of Employee Empathy on Service Recovery Performances

This research compares the impact of employee service recovery strategies with focus on affective (i.e., empathic concern) and cognitive empathy (i.e., perspective-taking) on customers’ emotional and behavioral recovery responses over three studies. Multiple regression analyses show employee empathic concern as unique predictor of customer recovery responses, independent from strategies based on cognitive empathy. We confirm empathic concern to strongly affect service recovery performances, thereafter we suggest service firms to develop an emotional path of recovering additional to their behavioral one which can reduce customer negative responses to service failures. The importance of affective recovering and further research issues are discussed.