Service failure and consumers' satisfaction with the healthcare industry: Moderating role of recommendation

This study explores the effects of service failure on different service attributes related to patients' satisfaction (i.e., therapeutic effect and service attitude). We consider patients' recommendation-seeking behavior, and examine the moderating effects of recommendation before medical consultation and its differences between the online and offline word-of-mouth (WOM) recommendations. We collected over 3,000,000 reviews from a leading Chinese online health community to facilitate the empirical analysis. We use two ordinal logit models as bases and, find that service failure exerts a negative effect on patients' both therapeutic effect satisfaction and service attitude satisfaction. Moreover, the effect of service failure will be attenuated if patients seek recommendations on doctors before consulting them. Moreover, the moderating effects of online WOM recommendations is demonstrated to be lower than those of the offline ones. Our findings provide important perspectives for the literature and managerial suggestions for stakeholders.