The role of customer forgiveness and perceived justice in restoring relationships with customers

This research explored whether customer forgiveness mediated the relationships between service failure severity (SFS) and customers’ coping behaviors and examined the moderating role of perceived justice in the proposed model. The results indicated that customer forgiveness played a crucial role in restoring relationships and reducing customers’ avoidance. Higher perceptions of justice for service providers’ recovery efforts weakened the negative effect of SFS on customer forgiveness. Additionally, the results showed that perceived high distributive justice attenuated the negative effect of SFS on customer forgiveness when perceived interactional justice was low. Such an attenuating effect decreased when perceived interactional justice increased.