Anna Mattila

Who they are

This page records the public professional record only. Nothing adverse is recorded and no motive is attributed.

Pennsylvania State University's research portal lists the 2004 paper among her publications, and her work sits in the university's hospitality management research. Her wider record, which is extensive, was not surveyed for this page.

Key papers

Wirtz, J., & Mattila, A. S. (2004), 'Consumer responses to compensation, speed of recovery and apology after a service failure', International Journal of Service Industry Management, 15(2), 150-166, doi:10.1108/09564230410532484. Read at the level of the published abstract.

Key ideas

The 2004 experiment treated a recovery as three levers pulled at once. Compensation stood for the outcome, the speed of the response for the procedure, and an apology for the treatment, matching the three kinds of fairness the service recovery literature had taken from justice theory: distributive, procedural and interactional.

The levers did not add up independently. An immediate response with an apology left compensation with nothing to contribute to satisfaction. A delayed response without an apology was beyond compensation's reach. Only in the mixed cases, a slow response with an apology or a fast one without, did compensation raise satisfaction. Satisfaction with the recovery then fully mediated the effects of all three on intention to return and on negative word of mouth.

The failure in the study involved no monetary cost to the consumer. That matters for reading the result. Where the loss is money, the outcome side has more work to do, and Holger Roschk and Katja Gelbrich's 2014 work found immediate money the best match for a monetary failure. Where the loss is time, attention or experience, the 2004 result suggests the procedure and the treatment carry most of the recovery.

The study's attribution finding is the less quoted one. How stable customers thought the failure was, and how far they thought the firm controlled it, varied with the recovery effort. A well-handled recovery, on that reading, changes the story the customer tells about why things went wrong.

How the paper is used

The article on what a customer apology must contain takes three things from the 2004 experiment. The first is the pattern of effects: money mattered least at the extremes, when the response was immediate and apologetic, and when it was slow and without apology. The second is the authors' own summary, that compensation is a poor substitute for a good recovery process. The third is the reminder that speed did its best work alongside an apology, which fits Moshe Davidow's 2003 proposal that timeliness may only be critical after an unreasonable delay.

The study is a scenario experiment, and the article read it at the level of the published abstract. Its failure involved no monetary loss, so the result says more about recoveries for lost time or attention than about refunds. Where the loss is money, the outcome side has more work to do. This page records the public professional record only, and it does not attribute any view to the researcher beyond what the paper states.

Her name appears beside Jochen Wirtz's on the paper, and the page for Wirtz carries the same reading of it. The two pages are meant to be read together, because the study cannot be attributed to one author alone. Satisfaction with the recovery fully mediated the effect of all three levers on the intention to return and on negative word of mouth, so the route from a recovery to loyalty ran through how the recovery felt to the customer, and the paper's own wording of that finding is the one to cite.

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