Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the service literature by investigating post-consumption evaluation in the context of unwanted services. In particular, it intends to delineate the main characteristics of funeral services.Design/methodology/approach: Given the lack of substantive literature on funeral services, a qualitative exploratory design was used from in-depth interviews with ten managers of funeral services companies in Quebec (Canada).Findings: The study shows that compared to other traditional services, funeral services are characterized by their strong emotiveness, non-recurrence, irreversibility, uncommonness, high level of symbolism and personalization and emotion control of the service provider. The study also argues that funeral services quality is strongly dependent on funeral houses’ integrated logistics, proximity and integrity.Practical implications: Because of consumers’ lack of competency, funeral companies need to guide and educate consumers about the criteria they should use to evaluate the service quality. Because funeral consumers are strongly emotion-driven at the purchase time, funeral services providers should find the right balance of emotions to express. Thus, more staff training is needed.Originality/value: Because funeral services are emotionally challenging and deal with grief and distressed clients, the present study contributes in shedding light on service quality assessment in the funeral industry. Although they have some characteristics of traditional services (intangibility, perishability and variability), funeral services are also different in many ways.

This paper investigates the role of customer orientation (CO), technology orientation (TO), and internal orientation (IO) in explaining firms’ service recovery performances. Multilevel analysis is used for data collected from 500 complaining customers nested in 100 firms to test the study’s hypotheses. Findings show that while the three knowledge-based resources (CO, IO, and TO) increase customers’ recovery satisfaction, only the human knowledge resources provide a buffer effect against the detrimental effects of service failures through the activation of their confirmatory biases. The result indicates the viability of TO as a recovery reactive resource rather than as a preventive resource.