When Design Goes Wrong? Diagnostic Tools for Detecting and Overcoming Failures in Service Experience

Service recovery is one of the most researched areas in the disciplines of business, marketing, tourism and information systems due to the inevitability of service failures. Despite its increasing attention from scholars and practitioners, the efficacy of relying on recovery strategies for managing customer service experience has long been a great concern. Given that service recovery can only partially compensate the detrimental impact of service failures, this chapter argues that operators should “proactively” detect and redress failures in the current service design as opposed to “reactively” defend service failures and manage service recovery. Following this notion, this chapter aims at introducing five diagnostic tools for deconstructing the structure of an experience and thereby detecting and overcoming failures in service experience. The five tools are service flowcharts, service blueprints, service maps, service failure proofing and the fishbone diagram. In addition to the introduction, this chapter includes the empirical demonstration of applying service maps for service failure detection. Harnessing consumer reviews on TripAdvisor.com of three luxury hotels in Vienna as the data source, the empirical demonstration exhibits the major areas of improvement in each corresponding property. Being one of the first attempts that integrate analysis of online reviews with diagnostic tools for service experience enhancement, this chapter does not only complement service design literature with a demonstration prototype but also provide operators in the service industry with useful tools and examples of how diagnostic tools can assist in detecting service failures and then advising solutions for service design advancement.