Tom DeWitt

Who they are

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

He is founder and director of CXM@MSU and a fixed-term faculty member in the Department of Marketing at Michigan State University's Broad College of Business, and founder and academic director of its Master of Science in Customer Experience Management. University and press material describe the programme as North America's first master of science in the subject; that description is the programme's own and was not independently verified. He spent eleven years at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, where he was an associate professor of marketing and founded the university's Office of Applied Learning Experiences, and he founded CX of M, an association of customer experience professionals in Michigan.

CXM@MSU is a university-housed body that runs both the degree programme and industry conferences twice a year. His research field, service failure and recovery, is adjacent to the enterprise customer experience material the book addresses. That is a description of where the published expertise sits.

Key papers

DeWitt, T., & Brady, M. K. (2003), 'Rethinking Service Recovery Strategies: The Effect of Rapport on Consumer Responses to Service Failure', Journal of Service Research, 6(2), 193-207, doi:10.1177/1094670503257048.

DeWitt, T., Nguyen, D. T., & Marshall, R. (2008), 'Exploring Customer Loyalty Following Service Recovery: The Mediating Effects of Trust and Emotions', Journal of Service Research, 10(3), 269-281, doi:10.1177/1094670507310767.

Nguyen, D. T., DeWitt, T., & Russell-Bennett, R. (2012), 'Service Convenience and Social Servicescape: Retail versus Hedonic Setting', Journal of Services Marketing, 26(4), 265-277.

Simmons, W., & DeWitt, T. (2025), The Customer Excellence Enterprise, John Wiley and Sons.

Key ideas

Most recovery strategies start after the failure. The 2003 paper with Michael Brady proposed that states before it, such as an ongoing rapport with service employees, also provide recovery benefits. Across four independent studies, existing rapport between customer and provider produced higher satisfaction after a failure, higher repatronage intentions and less negative word of mouth. It did not make customers more likely to complain about poor service.

The 2008 paper with Doan Nguyen and Roger Marshall asked why fair recoveries produce loyalty. It proposed a cognitive appraisal model in which trust and emotions mediate the relationship between perceived justice and loyalty, and treated emotion as two dimensions, positive and negative, rather than only the negative. A structural equation model on a hospitality scenario study of 459 people supported it: perceived justice predicted trust and positive emotion and reduced negative emotion, and trust fully mediated the link between justice and loyalty.

The two papers map onto the book closely. The 2003 rapport result is close to an empirical version of the goodwill bank, and the 2008 trust result is the mechanism under experience recovery. The book cites neither, and the vault records that as a structural fact about the book rather than as an inference about anyone's reasons.

On this site the rapport finding is read alongside Stephen Tax and colleagues' 1998 result that prior good experience softens poor complaint handling only to a limited extent. Goodwill buys patience; it does not pay for a bad recovery.

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