Dealing with the Unavoidable - The Impact of Service Failure Recovery Management on Shelf Availability: Structured Abstract: An Abstract

Out of stock (OOS) situations remain a major problem for individual firms and the entire supply chain. Retailers are faced with limited resources (e.g., staff or money) to manage OOS situations at the store level. This paper deals with effective service failure recovery management by highlighting short- and long-term consequences of OOS, variations between product types and the level of product importance, the role of customers’ expectations of on shelf availability (OSA), and the effects of different service recovery measures. Therefore, we conducted a scenario-based experiment within 3,353 German customers. The findings suggest that the occurrence of OOSs has both short- and long-term consequences with regard to customers. We find that OOSs of high importance products are perceived as more severe than OOSs of low importance ones. We additionally investigate that the effect of OOSs is fuelled by previous expectations towards OSA. Finally, we assess that the provision of recovery measures decreases the effect of OOSs and that there is a difference between the provision of basic and enhanced (‘plus’) recovery measures in the case of hedonic products, but not in the case of utilitarian products.