Customer Counterfactual Responses to Restaurant Service Failure and Its Recovery

The objective of this study is to examine how customers build emotions, perception, and future intentions through counterfactual reasoning in situations of service failure and its recovery effort in a restaurant setting. The experiment survey was conducted online with the assistance of Gallup Korea. As confirmed by prior research in service failure, respondents in a normal event exhibit a rising degree of recovery satisfaction and revisit intention as the level of recovery increases. Training wait staff about first-time customers’ counterfactual reasoning will help restaurant managers to expand their customer bases by increasing the market share of new customers