The current research questions if service recovery has differential effects on complainers depending on the way that they initially complain, being privately (e.g., emails, phone call) or publicly (e.g., social media, blogs). Using four studies, the current research offers several core contributions. First, building on justice theory, our findings show that a recovery is especially effective at appeasing private complainers’ negative affect, while this same recovery has less impact for public complainers. Second, we show that for public complainers, the role of a recovery will be different depending on the level of public exposure. When public complaints are viewed by just a few observers on social media (i.e., low exposure), such complainers assess their own actions of justice restoration as being ineffective. Third, we find that our previous findings are robust no matter if the customer is a complainer or an observer.

当前的研究问题是，服务恢复是否对投诉者产生不同的影响，具体取决于他们最初投诉的方式，是私下（例如，电子邮件、电话）还是公开（例如，社交媒体、博客）。使用四项研究，当前的研究提供了几个核心贡献。首先，基于正义理论，我们的研究结果表明，恢复在安抚私人投诉者的负面影响方面特别有效，而同样的恢复对公共投诉者的影响较小。其次，我们表明，对于公众投诉者，恢复的作用将根据公众暴露程度而有所不同。当社交媒体上只有少数观察者看到公众投诉时（即低曝光率），这些投诉者认为他们自己的司法恢复行动是无效的。第三，我们发现无论客户是抱怨者还是观察者，我们之前的发现都是可靠的。