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ld execute with the actual experience with the service.

Positive, negative or share confirmation of expectations will either vary or maintain current levels of the customer's image of the supplier and his consequent satisfaction with and intent to remain with the supplier. A service failure is said to take place when the service encounter falls short of the customer's expectations (i.e. negative disconfirmation) (Bell and Zemke 1987).

Researchers have suggested that service failure and recovery encounters provide opportunities for firms to communicate commitment to customers and reinforce bonds (Berry and Parasuraman 1991) and that service recovery should be scrutinized as a strategic marketing variable that offers a priceless return in the shape of increased customer satisfaction and retention (Bell and Zemke 1987; Hart, Heskett and Sasser 1990).

Leading researcher have pointed out that customer evaluations of service encounters are important fundamentals of customer satisfaction and long-term loyalty, identify for a greater focus on the relationships among service encounter issues and other organizational concerns such as repatronage, quality, and productivity, and identified service recovery as one of the most important future research subject for services marketing academicians (Fisk, Brown and Bitner1993).

Bitner, Booms, and Tetreault (1990) found that over 23 percent of unforgettable satisfactory encounters in the service industries were directly due to event relating to the way service employees reaction to service failures. This finding exhibit that service system failures can be perceived as extremely satisfactory encounters if a proper recovery measure are taken, and make available further proof of the service recovery paradox. On the other hand, a frighteningly large proportion (43 percent) of dissatisfactory service encounters was due to employees' inability or reluctance to respond to service breakdown.

In a recent study of customer switching behavior in a wide variety of service industries (Keaveney 1995), service failures and failed recoveries accounted for almost 60 percent of the critical behaviors by service providers that led straight to customer switching. Of the 60 percent, 45 percent of these behaviors were referring to as the sole reason for the customers switching to another service provider. These percentages most likely underestimate the level of customer switching due to service failures since at least two other categories of critical behaviors, inconvenience and ethical problems, included various forms of service failures that led to customer switching, such as unreasonable waiting time (for the service or to get an engagement) and dishonest or intimidating behavior by service provider. In terms of customer defection, these results provide persuasive evidence of the potentially damaging clash of service failures followed by ineffective or non-existent service recoveries.

Johnston (1995) also used the critical incident technique to scrutinize the impact of service failure and recovery stumble upon on satisfaction and reported evidence of the importance of responsiveness, empathy, communication, flexibility, and friendliness in the service recovery procedure, across a variety of service industry surroundings.

Service encounters linking a failure and recovery provide the customer with new information thus tha