Service Failure, Recovery, and Sustainable Development

Extant literature on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and marketing shows that CSR plays an important role when a service fails; thus, application of recovery strategy becomes crucial for sustainable development. CSR creates greater performance expectations amongst stakeholders as well as helps to legitimise organisational activities when a service fails. This study maintains that CSR is crucially important not only in legitimising organisational actions, but in ensuring that stakeholders' loyalty, trust, and justice are assured. This CSR, service failure, and recovery nexus is more needed in the controversial extractive industry in Nigeria, which has a history of illegitimacy, irresponsible corporate responsibility, lack of accountability, and failure of justice, which have triggered and sustained corporate-stakeholder conflict. This landscape has negative impact on sustainable development, peace, and justice in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria, where oil is extracted.

Past, present and future of bank marketing: a bibliometric analysis of International Journal of Bank Marketing (1983–2020)

PurposeThis study aims to provide an overview of bank marketing through a retrospection of the International Journal of Bank Marketing (IJBM), the leading journal for bank marketing.Design/methodology/approachThis study conducts a bibliometric analysis to analyze the performance and intellectual structure of bank marketing literature curated through IJBM between 1983 and 2020.FindingsThis study sheds light on the growing influence and impact of IJBM on the field of bank marketing through six major clusters (themes): relationship marketing and service quality in banking and financial services, consumer behavior in banking and financial services, customer satisfaction and loyalty in banking and financial services, electronic or online banking and financial services, Islamic banking and financial services, and service failure and recovery in banking and financial services.Research limitations/implicationsThough this study offers a state-of-the-art overview of bank marketing through the lens of IJBM, the insights remain limited to the accuracy and availability of bibliographic data of the journals from Scopus.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors' knowledge, this study represents the first objective assessment of bank marketing and IJBM. Thus, this study should be useful to past and prospective authors, editorial board members, editors, readers and reviewers to gain a one-stop understanding about bank marketing through the contributions of IJBM.

To Err Is Human(-oid): How Do Consumers React to Robot Service Failure and Recovery?

Robots are the next wave in service technology; however, this advanced technology is not perfect. This research examines how social perceptions regarding the warmth and competence of service robots influence consumer reactions to service failures and recovery efforts by robots. We argue that humanoid (vs. nonhumanoid) service robots are more strongly associated with warmth (whereas competence does not differ). This tendency to expect greater warmth from humanoid robots has important consequences for service firms: (i) consumers are more dissatisfied due to lack of warmth following a process failure caused by a humanoid (vs. nonhumanoid; Study 1); (ii) humanoids (but not nonhumanoids) can recover a service failure by themselves via sincere apology, restoring perceptions of warmth (Study 2A); (iii) humanoids (but not nonhumanoids) can also effectively provide explanations as a recovery tactic (Study 2B); and, importantly, (iv) human intervention can be used to mitigate dissatisfaction following inadequate recovery by a nonhumanoid robot (Study 3), supporting the notion of human-robot collaboration. Taken together, this research offers theoretical implications for robot anthropomorphism and practical implications for firms employing service robots.