The issue of “service recovery,” restoring good relations with a customer after an e-commerce service problem, is the topic of this paper. It shows the significant role emotions play in service recovery and the importance of maintaining trust. The main conclusion is that the customer’s emotional state after a complaint has been dealt with is a strong predictor of successful service recovery: a positive emotional state predicts satisfactory service recovery. Customer trust is predicted by satisfactory service recovery. Positive emotions predict trust and also loyalty, but the relationship between emotions and trust is not as strong as between emotions and service recovery.

The research is based on a questionnaire completed by 303 respondents, each of whom had issued a complaint after a business-to-consumer (B2C) transaction. The results were analyzed thoroughly using partial least squares, verified using common method bias assessment and a structural model. Implications of the research are that employees should be trained to recognize and manage customer emotions when dealing with complaints. Customer feedback should attempt to monitor customer satisfaction from a single service recovery and also the degree of customer trust. This paper is a careful study. The individual findings are not surprising, but the overall conclusions are compelling.