Market oriented learning and customer value enhancement through service recovery management

While recovering from service failures is often viewed as an operational concern, service providers can also adopt a strategic and conceptual service vision for managing their service recovery. This paper discusses how the management of service failures can be utilised as a catalyst to effectively initiate organization‐wide learning and can serve as a reflection of the firm's market orientation to enhance value. Failure‐recovery, at its inception, acts as an external‐to‐internal trigger that initiates numerous changes (innovations) – operational changes, strategic changes and conceptual changes. These changes guide the implementation of various value enhancing innovations throughout the entire organization and positively affect the firm's service vision and mission.