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Exploring the information

technology contribution to service
recovery performance through
knowledge based resources
Samiha Mjahed Hammami
Institut Superieur de Gestion (ISG), University of Tunis, Bardo, Tunisia, and

Abdelfattah Triki
University of Northumbria at Newcastle, Newcastle, UK, and
Institut Superieur de Gestion (ISG), University of Tunis, Bardo, Tunisia
Abstract
Purpose The objective of this paper is to highlight the importance of information technology in
service recovery performance through the exploration of its influence on service recovery performance
components and determinants.
Design/methodology/approach A general inductive approach for analyzing qualitative data
was adopted since the main research question of How can information technology enable successful
service recovery? has not been examined in the complaint management literature. Data were collected
through in-depth interviews with key executives working in the Tunisian banking sector.
Findings Drawing on the knowledge-based view (KBV), the authors develop a general framework
to understand the differences in service recovery performance (SRP). The research shows that various
knowledge-based resources such as customer orientation (CO), internal orientation (IO), and
information technology (IT) complement one another to impact on SRP. Ignoring the
complementarities of these resources in assessing SRP can seriously underestimate the impact of
IT on the knowledge assets that are embedded in the firm recovery competency. This distinctive
business competency is labelled knowledge enabled recovery effectiveness (KERE).
Research limitations/implications Given the exploratory nature of this study, these
preliminary results need quantitative research to refine theory and measurement of service
recovery capabilities and for future validation of the proposed framework.
Practical implications The findings provide important implications for the effective design and
the automation of complaint management and for the intervening mechanisms that govern the IT
business value.
Originality/value The paper examines the issue of complaint management from a knowledge
based view and calls for the need to consider specific customer relationship management (CRM) areas
as a set of knowledge based activities.
Keywords Knowledge based resources, Service recovery performance, Complaint management,
Information technology, Knowledge management, Service failures, Complaints, Tunisia, Banking
Paper type Research paper

VINE: The journal of information and

knowledge management systems
Vol. 41 No. 3, 2011
pp. 296-314
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0305-5728
DOI 10.1108/03055721111171627

1. Introduction
With the growing intensity and dynamism of competition, the source of competitive
advantage has shifted from physical, tangible assets to intellectual and knowledge
based resources (Prahalad and Hamel, 1990; Ramaswami et al., 2009). Marketing
researchers in recent years have begun giving attention to the creation and

management of customer-related capabilities that foster sustainable competitive

advantage. Practitioners suggest that businesses should deploy customer relationship
management (CRM) technology systems as means to enhance customer relationship
performance.
Complaint management[1] is one special CRM area where capabilities can be
manifested to act on service failure in order to generate superior customer and
organisation value. As new technology is constantly challenging assumptions about
customer service and pushing the frontier of what firms can do (Brohman et al., 2009),
self service recovery and agent-based complaint management system (ACM) oriented by
web application will be prevalent to differentiate firms with superior responsiveness.
The need for academic work in this area has been recently recognized along with the
necessity for systematically studying the role of IS agents in service recovery
(Johansson, 2006), but empirical work is just beginning (Abu Bakar, 2008; Jarrar, 2009).
Firms that used to focus on developing their service recovery strategy, widely
defined as actions that an organisation takes in order to rectify failures (Kelly and
Davis, 1994), are now confronted with the challenge of identifying, developing, and
deploying knowledge resources and capabilities in ways that create sustainable
competitive advantage. Service recovery performance (SRP) has been operationalised
as the perceptions of employees abilities and actions to resolve a service failure to the
satisfaction of the customer (e.g. Ashill et al., 2005; Yavas et al., 2003). We believe that
only a knowledge-based perspective of service recovery is suitable to fully understand
service recovery performance which proposed to be reconceptualized from a
knowledge perspective. Creating this link between knowledge and recovery will
enable researchers and practitioners to investigate the relationship between different
configurations of processes and outcomes and then to design the architecture that
sustain these relationships. Thus, computer scientists must be able to solve the
problem of how such knowledge-enabling systems should be designed. Recent
computer science literature recognizes that, in order for computer applications to
become more customer-driven, there is a need to examine the translation of
specifications from the business to the service, or system level (Agrawal et al., 2005).
Offering some insights regarding knowledge management that enables service
recovery is badly needed for the technology requirements of computer science and
information system (IS). Drawing on the IS, strategic management and marketing
literature, we propose to explore the underlying mechanisms through which
information technology (IT) improves the firms recovery capabilities.
2. Background literature
Research streams that are deemed relevant for the firm service recovery context are the
knowledge-based view (KBV), an extension of the resource-based view (RBV),
information technologies, a reinforcement of the KBV, and customer knowledge
management (CKM).
2.1 The KBV of the firm as an extension of the RBV
The RBV depicts companies as a collection of resources and capabilities required for
product or market competition. It adopts an inward-looking view, and emphasizes
heterogeneous firm resource endowments as a basis for competitive advantage (Hooley
et al., 2005; Barney, 1991). Heterogeneity of resources is constituted of four dimensions:

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value, rarity, imperfect imitability and lack of strategically equivalent substitutes. If a

resource is weak in any of the above dimensions, its status as a primary source of
competitive advantage will be diluted.
The KBV of the firm, an extension of the RBV, argues that the products and services
produced by tangible resources depend on how they are combined and applied, which
is a function of the firms know-how. This know-how is embedded in and carried
through individual employees as well as entities such as organization culture and
identity, routines, policies, systems, and documents (Nonaka et al., 2006). The KBV of
the firm posits that knowledge assets may produce a long-term sustainable competitive
advantage for the organization because knowledge-based resources are socially
complex and difficult to imitate (Alavi and Leidner, 2001; Nonaka et al., 2006).
Although the RBV of the firm recognizes that knowledge is the most
strategically-significant resource of the firm, it treats knowledge as a generic
resource and does not assume special characteristics neither does it distinguish
between different types of organizational knowledge-based capabilities. These
capabilities involve the integration of multiple knowledge bases (Grant, 1996) which
are complex bundles of skills and accumulated knowledge, exercised through
organizational processes that ensure superior business performance (Day, 1994).
Capabilities can be sorted into three categories based on their orientation and the focus
of their defining processes (Day, 1994): Inside-out capabilities focus on the firms
internal resources and capabilities such as human resource management, financial
management, cost control, technology development and integrated logistics. By
contrast, outside-in capabilities, which focal point is almost exclusively outside the
organization, connect the organisations capabilities to the external environment and
enable it to compete successfully by anticipating market needs ahead of competitors
and creating durable relationships with customers, channel members and suppliers.
Spanning capabilities integrate the inside-out and outside-in capabilities. They
typically require both understanding of market requirements and internal
competencies to fulfil them, and include strategy development, customer service
delivery, new product development, price setting, customer order fulfilment etc.
2.2 Information technologies as reinforcement of the KBV of the firm
One of the challenges in the field of research into knowledge management lies in
analysing empirically how technology influences the firms performance. It seems that
IT alone is unlikely to be a source of sustainable competitive advantage and that the IT
business value depends on a combination of IT and other various related resources.
The firms ability to mobilize and deploy IT-based resources in combination with other
resources and capabilities entails a firms physical IT infrastructure, its human IT
resources (technical and managerial skills) and its ability to leverage IT for intangible
benefits (Bharadwaj, 2000). This was referred to as IT capability, IT competency, or IT
orientation in IS literature (Tsai et al., 2008; Harrington and Guimaraes, 2005; Boynton
et al., 1994; Yin, 2006; Tippins and Sohi, 2003; Salavou, 2005).
The combination of technological and complementary resources offers a promising
track to overcome the disappointing results in the CRM implementation processes
( Jayachandran et al., 2005; Homburg and Furst, 2005) and the CRM value creation
(Grant, 1996). Actually, practitioners suggest that businesses should deploy CRM
technology systems as means to enhance customer relationship performance. However,

many CRM projects show that technology has not delivered the promised outcomes
and that four out of five CRM software fail to deliver the goods.
2.3 Going beyond CRM: the advent of CKM
Research in customer relationships proposed a number of paradigms in response to
such dilemma, particularly superior customer-relating capability (Day, 2003),
interaction orientation (Ramani and Kumar, 2008), and customer knowledge
management (Minna and Aino, 2005; Paquette, 2007; Paquette and Chun, 2008;
Salomann. et al., 2005, 2006). Superior customer-relating capability assesses how a
company builds and manages its best connections to their customers. It comprises
three organisational components (Day, 2003):
(1) Customer-relationship orientation the shared belief that customer retention is
a high priority for everyone, the openness of the organisation to sharing
information about customers, and the wide latitude given to employees, as part
of an overall willingness to treat customers differently to satisfy them.
(2) Configuration includes the structure of the organisation, its processes for
personalizing product or service offerings, and its incentives for building
customer relationships.
(3) Information refers to in depth and relevant information about customers that is
made available through IT systems in all parts of the company.
The interaction orientation reflects a firms ability to interact with its individual
customers and take advantage of information obtained from them through successive
exchanges to achieve profitable customer relationships. It is a composite construct
encompassing four components (Ramani and Kumar, 2008):
(1) Customer concept. The belief that the unit of analysis of every marketing action
and reaction should be the individual customer.
(2) Interaction response capacity. Reflects the ability to use dynamic database
systems and processes to interact with and respond to customers.
(3) Customer empowerment. Reflects the extent to which a firm provides its
customers means to connect with the firm and actively shape the nature of
transactions; and to collaborate with each other by sharing information (praise,
criticism, suggestions and ideas about products, services and policies).
(4) Customer value management. Is the extent to which the firm can define and
dynamically measure individual customer value and use it as a guiding metric
for marketing resource allocation decisions.
The tenets of CKM theory reproach CRM literature to be too technological and contend
that CRM processes should be considered as knowledge-intensive processes. Paquette
(2007) describes CKM as the processes that a firm employs to manage the
identification, acquisition, creation and utilization of customer knowledge. Salomann
et al. (2005, 2006) identify three kinds of knowledge flows that play a vital role in the
interaction between an organization and its customers and conceptualise customer
knowledge management as the utilization of knowledge for, from and about customers
in order to enhance the customer-relating capability of organizations. Knowledge for
customers supports customers in their buying cycle; it includes everything an

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organization provides to its customers. While this has traditionally focused on

information and expertise regarding products and services, more recently, with the
advent of e-business, customers are benefiting from a much broader range of company
knowledge designed for them. Knowledge from customers is referred to the knowledge
residing in customers and enables companies to make more intelligent decisions about
products, services, and communication gateways with customers as customers
reinforce their own expertise while using a product or a service. Knowledge about
customers encompasses the customers structured data (e.g. name, contact information,
preferences), past transactions, customers present needs and requirements, future
desires, connections, purchasing activity and financial capability.
3. Extending the knowledge-based theory to the service recovery context
The (KBT) is deemed relevant in service recovery as it stems from the theorization of
why firms reveal performance differences and leads to a better understanding of why
some organizations succeed in managing their business, while others fail. It is our
contention that the KBT may reveal reasons why some organisations manage their
complaints successfully while others do not.
3.1 The centrality of knowledge in service recovery
Service recovery has long been defined as actions geared towards failures redemption
and not as an organisational capability. Nonetheless drawing on the KBV, it is believed
to be necessary in dynamic environments and relevant to explaining performance
differences.
La and Kandampully (2004) contend that failure-recovery, at its inception, acts as an
external-to-internal trigger that initiates numerous operational, strategic and conceptual
changes. This is consistent with the principle of synergy among inside-out, outside-in,
and spanning processes in business organisations (Day, 1994) and with the notion of
learning orientation regarding the creation and use of not only market-based knowledge
but also many other kinds of knowledge (Baker and Sinkula, 1999).
Internal knowledge is crucial in determining the firms service recovery capabilities
since the majority of firms focus on collecting complaints without proceeding with
their analysis and use (Homburg and Furst, 2005). The presence of valuable external
sources of knowledge, specifically complaints, does not imply that the inflow of new
knowledge into the organization is an automatic or easy process.
Complaint, as external knowledge can only be recognized, accessed and assimilated
when firms develop new routines and change their organizational structure and culture
to facilitate service recovery processes. A thorough understanding of service recovery
management requires a better understanding of these in sourcing mechanisms,
routines and structures. Hence, it is necessary to explore how firms implement
organizational routines to tap into such external knowledge.
3.2 Complaint management processes as knowledge flows
3.2.1 Complaint management literature with respect to CKM. The complaint
management process is found to involve a two-way flow of feedback: an external
feedback from complaint to organisation and an internal feedback or
intra-organisational feedback (La and Kandampully, 2004). The categorization of
this knowledge process in a manner consistent with CKM perspective (Paquette, 2007)

allows us to underline the fact that complaint management can be established in a way
that addresses consumer knowledge problems. As such, a complaint management
process involves complaint acquisition, transmission, analysis, handling and use of
complaint related information in decision making.
.
Complaint acquisition. From the complaint literature, two modes of complaint
acquisition are identified, formal and informal. The former is manifested in the
use of different media adopted to actively seek feedback from dissatisfied
customers (e.g consumer survey, interviews, meeting, telephone, letters, and
web). The latter is manifested by the face-to-face interaction between frontline
employees and customer offering an opportunity for exploring dissatisfaction. In
this case the solicitation of complaint is proactive. Many organisations recognize
that complaints are the tip of the iceberg but are reluctant to look below the
structure (Stauss and Seidel, 2008; Johnston and Mehra, 2002).
.
Complaint transmission. Since customers often lodge complaints within the
nearest employee (Tax and Browen, 1998), it is necessary to communicate
internally the complaint in order to be aware of the problem and to forward the
complaint to whom it may concern. The common lack of an effective intra
organizational transmission of customer complaints to complaint managers and
to executives are caused by mechanisms that aim at protecting employees from a
potential threat (Homburg and Furst, 2007). The prevalence of such defensive
organisational behaviour can be avoided by the reinforcement of an internal
service recovery orientation (Homburg and Furst, 2007).
.
Complaint analysis. Effective service recovery management should aim at correcting
weaknesses in a firms service processes. Analysing the reasons for complaints and
identifying the root causes of customer dissatisfaction is the one major acid test
failed by organisations when they deal with complaints (Michel et al., 2009).
.
Complaint handling. It is the organizational response to the complainant. It
encompasses all the complaint management activities that the customer
perceives during the handling process and that have a direct effect on
satisfaction (Stauss and Seidel, 2004). When evaluating service recovery, three
types of justice are operant (Tax et al., 1998): the distributive justice, the
procedural justice and the interactional justice. The first refers to what the
offending firm specially did to offer the customer recovery from the failure and
the extent to which this outcome (output) offset the cost (input). The second
refers to the fairness of the resolution procedures in terms of delay, accessibility,
flexibility etc. The third refers to the manner in which people are treated during
the complaint handling process.
.
The use of complaint information in decision making. To use complaint data to
drive improvement, the firm needs to have a common understanding of the
issues and problems. So, reports of complaint issues and learning points need to
be established and widely circulated throughout an organisation. A good
complaint management incorporates the experience of customers concerns into
strategic planning ( Johnston and Mehra, 2002; La and Kandampully, 2004). The
service provider should use the identified service problem and its remedy to
realign the inner mechanisms of the service system.

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Figure 1.
Parallelism between
customer complaint
management and
customer knowledge
management

3.2.2 Complaint-related knowledge. The organisation adapts its routines to realize value
from customer complaint, a knowledge that it does not currently own. It is engaged in a
complaint management process involving three different types of CKM each of which
uses knowledge in a different way: knowledge about customers, knowledge from
customers, and knowledge for customers (Salomann et al., 2005, 2006).
Knowledge about customers does not only include the critical customer statements
as acquired through complaint reception, it also includes a record of the complaint as it
is communicated internally (complaint-related knowledge identification). With this
type of knowledge, the goal of CKM is to infuse awareness of the problem in the staff
and to understand customer needs, their unsatisfied expectation and preferences
toward product or service features, all by creating a single unified and comprehensive
view of the customers voice across the business functions.
Whence this knowledge about customer is recorded, disseminated within the
company and therefore codified into knowledge by the company, it is exploited and
transformed into knowledge from customer through complaint analysis that reveals
indications of operational weaknesses and market opportunities and provides clear
indications of the actual causes of deficiencies. The final dimension of customer
knowledge in the complaint management process is knowledge for customer, referred
to as complaint-related knowledge utilisation. It is derived from two sub-processes:
First, handling of complaints that delivers value in the short term by restoring
satisfaction with a fair solution, and value in the long term by improving customer
experience with the firm thereby enhancing customer trust and commitment towards
it. Second, the use of complaint information in decision making which ensures
long-term strategic values that derive from knowledge for customer around developing
innovative products and services and improving quality.
It is thus not surprising to see that the core processes of service recovery share great
similarities with customer knowledge management (see Figure 1). This convergence
underlines the appropriateness of implementing service recovery as knowledge based
activities.
Recognizing this as a gap in service recovery literature, we generated the service
recovery performance concept from the KBT perspective and labelled it Knowledge
enabled recovery effectiveness (KERE). It is defined as the organizations capability to
effectively manage complaints and translate the degree to which the company is
endowed with the expertise of handling complaints, of overcoming service failures, of

solving problems arising from disruptions or misadventures during service delivery

encounters and of improving the service and making sure problems do not occur again.
4. Methodology
The methodology of this study relies on exploration and theory development. The
inductive approach is deemed relevant for understanding the IT contribution to the
service recovery performance. The extant literature lacks established theoretical
frameworks in this issue. The objective of this research is to highlight the importance
of IT in service recovery performance through the exploration of its impacts on service
recovery performance components and determinants.
According to Thomas (2006, p. 238) inductive analysis refers to approaches that
primarily use detailed readings of raw data to derive concepts, themes, or a model
through interpretations made from the raw data by an evaluator or researcher. He
ascertains that many of the qualitative data procedures are associated with specific
approaches or traditions, such as grounded theory, phenomenology, discourse
analysis, and narrative analysis. However, some analytic approaches are generic and
are not labelled within one of the specific traditions of qualitative research. Thomas
(2006) labels the strategy of such analyses of qualitative data as general inductive
approach and finds it easy to use as it does not require in-depth understanding of a
specialist approach, a simple and straightforward approach for deriving findings
linked to focused research questions.
We use this strategy of qualitative analysis of the raw data that were collected from
talking directly with people involved in service recovery encounter in a leading bank
based in Tunisia. We stopped recruiting interviewees when saturation is reached, i.e.
when no more significant findings are derived from additional information.
The banking market in Tunisia went through tremendous changes in the last
decade with the arrival of new competitors, the development of IT and with the
volatility of better informed and more mature customers.
The research involves two main procedures: first, we conducted an in-depth
interview with the complaints manager at the bank headquarter during one hour and a
half in order to get familiarized with the complaint management software. Second, we
conducted in-depth interviews with 16 key informants: These were eight frontline
employees and eight managers of different agencies located in three regions. They are
considered as an integrated part of the complaint management process. Allowing such
diversity in the sample will enhance the explanatory potential of the emerging theory
(Strauss and Corbin, 1998).
Each interview has lasted for an average of three quarters of an hour. All the
interviews were recorded after the interviewees permission. The interview guide is
provided below:
(1) General
.
When the complaint management is evoked, what ideas cross your mind?
.
Can you talk to me about your service recovery?
.
How do you define a successful service recovery?
.
According to you, what are the determinants of such a success?
.
Why, do you think, certain firms succeed in dealing with complaints and
others do not?

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(2) Theme 1: IT role in the service recovery

.
According to you, what role does the IT play in service recovery
performance?
.
According to you, is IT sufficient enough for an adequate service recovery
performance?
(3) Theme 2: The circumstances of IT impact on service recovery performance
.
What are the factors that you deem important for such effect?
.
What should companies do to reinforce such factors?
Questions hinge around three main themes:
(1) the determinants of successful service recovery;
(2) the roles of IT in the service recovery encounter; and
(3) the organisational context that conditions such impact.
The information resulting from the interviews are transcribed for content analysis.
An inductive coding consists in creating categories from phrases or meanings in
specific text segments. The material is classified into upper-level and lower-level
categories. The former are general as they are perceived to be associated with the
research aims. The latter are specific as they are derived from searching subtopics
within each category, including contradictory points of view and new insights.
Relevant quotations that convey the core theme or essence of a category are
selected.
In this inductive generative process of content analysis of the interviews data, there
is little theory involved at the outset as we try to identify themes and obtain
substantive codes and generate insights from individual responses and their stories,
unencumbered by what we expect to find or what we have read in the literature.
The process of building category relationships is proposed as emerging theory,
outlined as a framework.
Once the theoretical scheme is outlined, we compare the emerging theory with the
existing literature.
5. Results
Six specific categories are identified and described from the two major categories
developed as main headings in the findings related to IT contribution in the SRP.
The model, consisting in the six specific categories mentioned below, is used to
highlight the main constituting elements of IT impact in the service recovery
performance.
(1) complaint responsiveness;
(2) complaint management process;
(3) internal service recovery;
(4) IT;
(5) internal orientation (IO);
(6) customer orientation (CO).

5.1 The importance of IT in SRP

Most interviewees recognized the role of IT for successful service recovery by referring
frequently to the complaint management system or software or application. An
examination of the verbatim extracted from the in-depth interviews data has led to the
identification of three categories of IT role in service recovery encounter: The impact of
IT on complaint management process, on internal service recovery and on complainant
interaction orientation (complaint responsiveness).
5.1.1 IT and the complaint management process. Interviews reveal the vital
importance of IT resources in the complaint management process. One of them states:
As systems architecture can impact the whole complaint management process: capturing,
disseminating, analysis and reporting, they are typically central in companies efforts to
reinvent the service recovery encounter. Radical modifications are introduced on the
organisational attempts to resolve incidents and even on the dissatisfied customer experience.

The solution provides a structured complaints activity flow and leverages workflow to
route complaints to appropriate individuals and departments for subsequent action.
The solution also simplifies tracking, reporting, and facilitate data access for trending
and forecasting purposes. This was exemplified by the following interviewees
expressions:
Our IT application allows service recovery team members to enter and access data and all
files easily, and dispatch complaints to other divisions automatically for resolution, to track
the status of complaint.
The complaint management software provides us with real-time reports, from standard to
sophisticated (tables, charts, graphs) allowing us to spot trends, and identify opportunities
(training, product improvement, etc.)

In line with Karimi et al. (2001), our qualitative study reports that IT resources optimise
the flow of information since they provide timely, accurate and reliable information,
ensuring thus an effective complaint management process:
With the complaint management software, we could really save considerable time thanks to
information availability and collaboration.

The above insights have much in common with Mithas et al. (2010) findings
ascertaining that information management capability enables faster and more
responsive redesign and reconfiguration of business processes.
5.1.2 IT and Internal service recovery. Employees involved in service recovery
encounter viewed the information system as a tool that can make tasks easier, and
more efficient. They found it to be an effective communication tool for sharing
knowledge about complaints. This was clear from different comments of interviewees.
Enhance each employees ability to address their core responsibilities.
Drive collaboration and improve personal productivity.
[. . .] enable knowledge exchange by promoting communication and boosting collaboration
among the service recovery team.

Further verbatim are evoked in appreciation of the firms ability to manage internal
relationship in complaint processing thanks to software technology:

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Support internal customers on the basis of sophisticated database and workflow

management systems.
Secure active participation of co-workers at the central, regional or local level as necessary,
and integrate front and back offices.

306

Other interviewees discourses substantiate the idea that a firm with information
management capability is less likely to fail in supporting their human resources when
dealing with complaints. We send notes and processing comments as e-mail messages
or telefaxes that are automatically generated by the system said one manager; When
the department concerned with the complaint goes beyond the deadline an integrated
reminder system automatically informs it about the delays whenever the application is
run. Another participant adds.
With the complaint management systems, appropriate classification attributes (e.g.
complaint product, customer characteristics categorisation) for complaint data is simply,
providing employees with the form of predefined alternatives to record complaints and
to support the investigation that can be conducted by various individuals.
We easily and rapidly record information in the corresponding category as the complainant
described it, the software technical implementation is flexible enough as it follows the
complaints narration of the service failure and is coherent with the firms problem and
solving policies.

The solution supports a number of organizational roles across the integrated complaint
management process. Views and security access can be assigned to roles and
responsibilities as defined for each end-user of the system, thus reflecting technology
enabled employees empowerment in the service recovery encounter. Interviewees did
not have any difficulties ascertaining that IT enables firms to empower employees in
the service recovery encounter:
Empower staff to make decisions.
Empower the employee with web based management tools for monitoring various aspects of
server data, that they are authorized to access, when need be.

One manager indicated that:

Give employees easy access to the information they need, but only to bits that they are
entitled with.

The complaint management software eliminates employees frustration arising from

interactions with complainants thanks to information availability.
Complaint management software allows staff to check the complainants file and to quickly
find previous issues, resolutions for similar cases and resources which give them self
confidence when dealing with angry customers.

5.1.3 IT and the complainant interaction orientation (complaints responsiveness). IT

resources are a precursor to the centrality of complainants in the organisational beliefs
and behaviours. To the extent that organisations are technology oriented, they instil
promoting visions and beliefs about complaints and prescribe employees actions and
reactions when dealing with complainants, so as to provide tailored service recovery
and co-create value with the complainants involvement and collaboration.

One top manager said:

By implementing the complaint management system we want to teach our employees to place
more value on complainants satisfaction throughout the complaint management activities
automatisation.

Most interviewees recognize the role of IT in enabling firms to respond quickly and
accurately to complainants, thus increasing their satisfaction.
The new web based complaint management software system, endows our organisation with
the capability to collect, store, analyse, and share complaint information in ways that greatly
enhance complainants responsiveness.

Interviewees ascertain that complaint management software improves customer

relationships by communicating information to the complainant as their matter
progresses to closure. One participant revealed that:
The software technology gives us an automatic reminder when communication is necessary
such as confirmation receipt, intermediate and final answer.

Another participant said:

[. . .] the system is linked to the corresponding telephone software to enable us to establish an
immediate telephone connection with customers.

Furthermore, firms with technology capabilities are more likely to engage in shaping a
personalized service recovery strategy. Interviews reveal that technology resources
help complaint handlers to understand a customers value contribution and individual
preferences, thereby helping them to tailor the recovery approach.
Employees verbatim suggest also that technology resources empower the customer
in the service recovery encounter:
With our feedback technology, particularly our web and call handling capabilities, we intend
to make it easier for customers to complain and give feedback; we seek to push dissatisfied
customers toward self-service by enabling them to log the complaint online with a customized
and simple user interface, to track their complaint online, check status, provide updates, add
attachments, or cancel the complaint at their convenience.
Actually we work to enable customers to track progress of existing open issues, even interact
directly with our staff online, as their matter progresses to closure.

IT resources are presumably central to shaping the organisational beliefs, actions and
reactions regarding complaints.
In sum, it seems that despite the interconnectedness between the complainant
interaction orientation, service recovery processes and internal service recovery as
revealed in the interviews, the categorisation of the IT impact on service recovery
performance through these three resources was made possible. It is likely that IT
resources enhance these knowledge assets that work synergistically together to build
the firm recovery capabilities.
5.2 The importance of non-IT resources in service recovery performance
The interviews contents substantiate the idea that some factors wrap up the impact of
IT in service recovery performance.

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A firm building good relationships with employees and developing a clear

understanding of the needs, preferences and opinions of internal customers (Bell et al.,
2004), that is a firm with internal orientation, is less likely to fail its complaint
management. One interviewee noted that:
[. . .] in order to successfully handle complaints a company must not only implement software
applications but also restructure its internal practices to produce value for its human
resources.

We thus posit that without adopting internal market orientation, firms are less likely to
manage complaints in a way that addresses the central issue of customer knowledge.
Because the service recovery encounter involves interactions between employees at all
levels, it is imperative that firms recognise the importance of staff management.
Throughout the interviews, when the importance of IT in service recovery
encounter was evoked, the theme of customer orientation always emerged:
[. . .] establishing a customer-centric vision should always be the first step towards
implementing the complaint management strategy; technology plays a critical role in
providing the infrastructure and tools to implement this vision and build it into daily
processes.

A senior manager ascertains that:

IT applications are capable of helping the firm to bring the entire company onto the targeted
level of customer orientation indispensable for optimal service recovery.

Interviewees did not have any difficulties coming up with explicit expressions of
how the IT role in service recovery performance is related to an interactive
mechanism between the above mentioned knowledge resources. One senior manager
commented:
IT can not achieve the full potential benefit of complaint management if our organisation
doesnt care about its customers and employees well-being; I believe that each of these
visions serve each other to accomplish a successful service recovery.

This research reveals that in order to ensure service recovery effectiveness, firms need
to be endowed with knowledge resources. A recovery oriented firm is represented by a
continuous improvement capabilities of building a free blame complaint culture that
promotes complainant responsiveness and valorises the complaint as a source of
knowledge, and capabilities of incorporating this view in the organisational structure
and practices through devising adequate service recovery processes, and motivating
and incentivising individuals (Internal service recovery). Technology needs to be in
place to support these organisational capabilities. But most importantly, being
customer oriented and internally oriented at the same time are prerequisites for an
adequate service recovery. Technology orientation must be embedded in both internal
and external orientation to achieve service recovery performance. IT combined with IO
and CO create a set of complementary resources for potent organisational capabilities
enabling service recovery to be carried out effectively (KERE).
We therefore posit a complementary interaction among the main categories derived
from the analysis, described as knowledge based resources. This category system is
incorporated into a general model (see Figure 2).

Exploring the IT
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309
Figure 2.
A tentative framework for
building knowledge based
complaint management

6. Conclusion
Despite decades of research on complaint management (e.g. Reichheld and Sasser,
1990; Hart et al., 1990; Bell and Zemke, 1987; Fornell and Westbrook, 1984; Gilly et al.,
1991), there are no elaborated contribution of IT to service recovery performance. IT
impact on service recovery is therefore believed to require an inductive approach which
explores perceptions and judgements of actors concerned with the phenomenon. This
allowed the emergence of theory from empirical investigations. By identifying and
defining categories from the corpus of data and by relating them to each other, our
study explores the effects of IT on service recovery performance and reveals its
components. These are found to be contingent on the deployment of other resources
such as CO and IO. The results indicate that IT is combined with non-IT resources to
develop recovery capabilities of responsiveness, processes and employees. When
customer value is leveraged with employee well-being, IT is believed to enhance the
firms ability to deal with service failures and to develop service recovery capabilities.
Drawing on the KBV, CO and IO are considered as knowledge based resources and
complaint management as knowledge based activities. Figure 1 is proposed to reveal
the similarities between the core processes of service recovery and customer
knowledge management. Figure 2 titled a tentative framework for building
knowledge based complaint management identifies IT impact on service recovery
performance through its influence on service recovery performance components and
determinants.
Internal service recovery; complaint responsiveness and the complaint processes
components of service recovery, labelled KERE, are in essence knowledge-based
resources. Consequently, service recovery is perceived as a system of interactions of
knowledge based resources were they linked with processes, customers, or employees.
So, to sum up, Figure 1 illustrates the parallelism between CKM and complaint
management. Figure 2 posits that KERE is determined by IT, CO, and IO and embodies
internal service recovery, complaint responsiveness and recovery process. KERE is a
construct reflecting the firm competency in complaint management.
Firms attempting to satisfy their external customers needs and to develop a clear
understanding of preferences and opinions of their internal customers, build
capabilities for effective complaints responses. IT helps firms to be both internally and
externally oriented.

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IT supports the descendant and ascendant flows of information and promotes

knowledge exchange about service recovery encounters. A technology-oriented firm
provides a common knowledge platform for frontline staff and service departments to
improve timeliness of information, support team work, provide faster answers to
queries analyse complaints and pursue product innovation and service enhancement.
The findings reported above show that ignoring the value of the synergy of these
capabilities in service recovery undermines the contribution of IT to complaint
management. CO, IO, IT operate as critical complementary capabilities that enhance
KERE. So, IO, CO, and IT as knowledge-based resources help companies develop skills
that are operant in redressing service failures and solving consumer problems. They
facilitate the building of service recovery competencies that are embodied in KERE.
IT will foster KERE when combined with, and complemented by, CO and IO than
when used in isolation. This is consistent with the idea that knowledge creation
emerges from the dynamic interactions of different organisational knowledge
components (Nonaka, 1994; Spender, 1996). This provides support for Days (1994)
assertion that the visibility and prevalence of spanning capabilities (in this case KERE)
are achieved and sustained by both outside-in, i.e. CO and TO and inside-out
capabilities, i.e. IO. The power of KBV is leveraged by the synergistic deployment of IT
and non-IT resources in a service failure situations.
7. Implications and further research avenues
Empirical evidence of service recovery effectiveness would provide an opportunity for
service professionals to increase the likelihood of achieving the service recovery
paradox (SRP), defined as a situation in which a customers post failure outcomes in
terms of satisfaction, repurchase intentions, word-of-mouth, trust and corporate image
(De Matos Celso et al., 2007; Michel and Meuter, 2008), exceed the prefailure ones when
customers receive effective service recovery.
In accordance with recent SI studies, exploring the IT role in service recovery
performance provides a better understanding of the mechanisms that govern the IT
business value.
Our results provide a comprehensive framework for understanding the complex
relationships between IT and service recovery capabilities. The combination of
technological resources and managerial resources is a promising avenue for the
reinforcement of service recovery performance. Our findings are consistent with
Brohman et al. (2009) who argue that an effective definition of performance should
include both a technical and a business perspective.
Our study demonstrates that the dynamic interaction between technology,
customers, and employees characterises the service recovery encounter. Knowledge
creation and learning are maximized through iterative and mutually reinforcing
interactions between actors and systems of the service recovery process. This result
underlines the need to design knowledge-enabled service recovery incorporating
customers, technology and employees. This helps companies operationalize the service
recovery practice appropriately and incorporate it in complaint management softwares
for an automatization that creates business value for the firm.
We believe that these preliminary results will stimulate further research to refine
theory and measurement of service recovery capabilities.

Our work takes a step in the body of recent research that has set up the stage for the
automation of complaint management. The deployment of such systems should
include these features: a process design that simplifies complaints management and
provides connections to existing functional departments, complaints management
detailed process flows, complaints management roles and responsibilities, individual
views, support for product investigations, workflow, ability to integrate with other
technologies, automatic generation of reports, corrective and preventive actions.
Note
1. Gilly et al. (1991) refer to complaint handling as the response given to the complainant and to
complaint management as the changes in policies and procedures oriented towards service
improvement after a customer complaint. Most studies in the literature use complaint
handling and complaint management interchangeably. They define complaint management
as the organisational process in response to customer dissatisfaction. As for service
recovery, it is defined as the organisations response to service failures. It encompasses a
much broader set of activities than complaint management. It includes situations in which a
service failure occurs, and yet no complaint is lodged (Smith et al., 1999). A consumer
initiated complaint is unnecessary because frontline service personnel have already
recognized and/or acknowledged the failure (Smith et al., 1999, p. 359). Stauss and Seidel
(2004) use the term complaint management in the meaning of service recovery and
acknowledge the importance of informal and of stimulated complaints as part of the
complaint management process. In keeping with the above authors, service recovery and
complaint management are used interchangeably in this paper.

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About the authors
Samiha Mjahed Hammami is a doctoral student at Institut Superieur de Gestion (ISG), University
of Tunis. Her research interests are geared towards customer knowledge management and
service recovery. Samiha Mjahed Hammami is the corresponding author and can be contacted at:
mjaheds@yahoo.fr
Abdelfattah Triki was a Fullbright Scholar at Boston University Business School in the USA
in 1986-1987. He then obtained a PhD in marketing from Northumbria University at Newcastle in
1999. He has been a member of the Academy of Marketing (GB) since 1997 and a reviewer for
several British academic journals. He is presently a Professor of Marketing and Director of
the Marketing Research Unit (www.isg.rnu.tn/URMR) at the Institut Superieur de Gestion of
Tunis University. He also directs several doctoral research projects on information and
communication technologies, innovation, and knowledge management.

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