Jochen Wirtz

Who they are

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

He is based at the National University of Singapore and is widely known as a co-author, with the late Christopher Lovelock, of the textbook Services Marketing: People, Technology, Strategy, which has run through many editions. His wider record was not surveyed for this page, which concerns the 2004 paper.

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 study examined how the three dimensions of fairness, distributive, procedural and interactional, shape consumers' attributions, their satisfaction after a recovery and their behaviour afterwards, measured as intention to return and negative word of mouth. It used a failure that did not cost the customer money.

Each dimension had an operational stand-in. Compensation represented the outcome, the speed of the recovery represented the procedure, and an apology represented the treatment. The three had a joint effect on satisfaction, and the joint effect is where the useful findings sit.

When the recovery process was well executed, an immediate response combined with an apology, compensation did not enhance satisfaction. When the process was poor, a delayed response without an apology, compensation failed to lessen dissatisfaction. Compensation worked in the mixed cases, a delayed recovery with an apology or an immediate one without. The authors concluded that compensation is a poor substitute for a good recovery process.

Two further results matter. Satisfaction with the recovery fully mediated the effects of compensation, speed and apology on intentions, so the route to loyalty ran through how the recovery felt. And consumers' attributions about the failure, how stable it was and how far the firm controlled it, varied with the recovery effort, which suggests a good recovery changes what customers think caused the failure as well as how they feel about it.

The finding sits comfortably beside Moshe Davidow's 2003 review, which proposed that timeliness may only be critical after an unreasonable delay, and beside Katja Gelbrich and Holger Roschk's 2011 meta-analysis, in which loyalty depended slightly more on treatment than on outcome.

How to read the result

The 2004 experiment is a scenario study, so it tests how people respond to a described failure and not to the anger of a real one. The failure it used cost the customer no money. That limits how far the finding carries to cases where the loss is financial, and the later matching work by Holger Roschk and Katja Gelbrich found that the best compensation is the same kind of resource as the loss. The article on what a customer apology must contain therefore uses the paper for the pattern it shows, that process and treatment can make compensation redundant or insufficient, and not for a rule about how much money a firm should give.

The result also fits the later experiment on the parts of an apology. Roschk and Susanne Kaiser found that, for failures in the process rather than the outcome, an apology did about as much as compensation. Read together, the two studies say that for non-monetary failures the apology and the speed of the response carry much of the recovery. The page records only what the published abstract states, and nothing here describes the authors' later work.

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