Drivers of the service recovery time zone of tolerance in a B2B context

Abstract

The time zone of tolerance is a new concept within marketing literature (Hogreve et al., 2017), and despite the fact that customer emotions of anger influence the duration of this tolerance, the need arose to explore the dynamics within this tolerance to gain a deeper understanding of the value it might hold to both academics and business. This study set out to discover the main drivers of the time zone of tolerance, uncover the service recovery expectations of customers during this time zone of tolerance, and explore how managing the time zone of tolerance can impact customer behavioural intentions. This study was conducted in a B2B environment. Valuable insights were gained on the fusion of marketing and engineering drivers that impact the time zone of tolerance. These main drivers are nature of failure, customer-firm dynamics, customer dynamics, firm dynamics and pro-active measures. Deeper understanding was gained on how customers expected firms to manage service recovery during this time zone of tolerance, with candid, honest communication and quick response time the mechanisms most mentioned by participants. Further understanding was achieved on the behavioural intentions of customers related to time zone of tolerance.