It is difficult to control service quality for any service firm and service failure is inevitable due to human or non-human factors.As a result,service recovery stirred the interest of researchers and practitioners.However, service failure may not be identified by firms because a majority of dissatisfied customers will not complain to the service provider.Thus,this research proposes a proactive customer feedback mechanism comprised of proactive solicitation of customer feedback,customers providing feedback and follow-up communication and examine their impact of customer evaluations in the context of service failure.This research tries to establish that through adding a continuous series of satisfied service encounters or'moment of truth'to service failure encounters,the customer evaluations(e.g.satisfaction,trust,purchase intent and positive WOM)toward the service will be significantly improved. Our research employed a 2×2×2 between subjects experimental design.Three independent variables were manipulated as presence and absence level,that is,firms either proactively solicitted customer feedback or employed no solicitation of feedback,Customers either provided feedback to the service firm or refused to provide feedback,and service firm either conducted follow-up communication or no follow-up communication. Our research adoptted a scenario in the context of patronizing a three-star hotel on a business trip.In total,221 business administration graduates from a famous university in Shanghai participated in the experiment. MANOVA was used to test the hypotheses.The results indicated that proactive solicitation significantly influenced trust(p<0.01).Besides satisfaction,the other dependent variables such as trust,purchase intent and positive WOM significantly differred between with and without follow-up communication groups(p<0.05). Third,a significant difference was detected regarding satisfaction,trust,purchase intent and positive WOM between customer providing feedback groups and no customer feedback groups(p<0.0
