How to Overcome Experiential Regret in Service Failure : The Important Role of Service Justices

Regret is so common as to be the second most frequently named emotion in a study of the use of emotions in everyday language (Shimanoff, 1984). Regret is a negative, cognitively based emotion that we experience when realizing or imagining that our present situation would have been better had we acted differently." (Zeelenberg, 1999). Meanwhile, complaint handling takes an important role in raising the retention rate of the customers who suffer from service problem (Hart et al., 1990). Customers anticipate enterprises will remedy their service failure. Complaining process enhances the relationship between dissatisfied customers and enterprise (Chebat and Slusarczyk, 2005). One of the strategies to retain customers is to recover justice from failures (Blodgett et al., 1997). This study intended to explore the impact of customer’s experiential regret in service failure on customer’s behavioral intention and investigate whether the service justice perceived by customer moderates the relationship between these two.