Typologies of Freight Forwarding Service Failures and Recovery Strategies

OpenAlex English

In broad terms, freight forwarders offer their customers certain logistics and shipping services.The customers who purchase these services are shippers, exporters and importers.The overall aim of the freight forwarders is to satisfy shippers, and thus sustain competitive advantages in the logistics industry.Shipper experience, dissatisfaction and complaints from freight forwarding services have not previously been studied to a greater degree in the literature.Business to business service quality research has grown as a result of increased attention to quality for shippers recently.The overall aim of this study is to analyze service failures encountered and service recovery strategies employed in freight forwarding industry.The analysis also covers the causes of such failures, the actions taken to recover service failures, and the effects of these actions on the relationship between the shippers and freight forwarders.In order to reach this aim, Critical Incidents Technique (CIT), a means of measuring the perceived service quality and service failures, is used.A total of 100 critical incidents; 50 from shippers and 50 from freight forwarders related to service failures and recoveries in the freight forwarding industry were analyzed.The overall findings revealed that the most prevalent service failures in the forwarding industry from the viewpoint of shippers are related to documentation, information and communication, operations, equipment, booking, and delivery services.The result of the study also revealed that apologizing from shippers, compensating all losses and damages and paying back certain amount of freight costs are most often employed recovery methods against freight forwarding service failures, and about in one fourth of such cases the encounters are likely to weaken the relationship between shippers and freight forwarders.From the freight forwarder employees' point of view service failures are categorized into seven main groups: failures in operations, documentation, booking, information and communication, problem shippers, delivery and equipment.Service recovery strategies employed by the freight forwarders from the employees' point of view