| Course | BU 242 Creating Customer Value in the Digital Age |
|---|---|
| Unit | Unit 7 |
| Paper type | Service recovery analysis |
| Length | About 1,000 words, 6 pages |
| Format | APA 7 student paper |
| School | Herzing University |
| Program | BS in Business Management |
| Updated | September 2026 |
Free sample paper for BU 242 Unit 7
A Refund That Took Two Days and a Supervisor: A Service Recovery Analysis of an Air Conditioner That Did Not Fit, Judged on Whether the Buyer Was Made Whole
Student Name
Business, Herzing University
BU 242: Creating Customer Value in the Digital Age
Instructor Name
April 15, 2026
A Refund That Took Two Days and a Supervisor: A Service Recovery Analysis of an Air Conditioner That Did Not Fit, Judged on Whether the Buyer Was Made Whole
Purchases fail, and what a seller does next can matter as much as the sale. This paper analyzes one failure from the case followed through this course. Tasha Morrow, a composite Philadelphia renter, picked up an 8,000 BTU window unit ordered from the composite chain Keystone Home Supply on Sunday, June 22, 2025, and found that evening that it could not be installed in her sliding window. The paper states the failure, records how she reported it and through which channel, times each step of the response with the actor responsible, sets down exactly what was offered and judges the outcome on whether she was actually made whole, including the hours she spent recovering.
The Failure
Keystone promised, through its product page, an air conditioner that would cool a room of up to 350 square feet, available for pickup that day. It delivered that product on time. What it did not deliver was a product the buyer could use, because the listing gave the window width range but not the window type, and the unit fit only double-hung windows. The buyer noticed at about 6:40 p.m. on Sunday, when she opened the box and read the installation manual. This is a failure of information rather than of the product or the store's operations, but from the buyer's side the result was the same as a defective unit: she had paid about $377 and could not cool her room.
The Report and the Channel
Tasha reported the problem on Monday morning, first through Keystone's online return portal at 9:20 a.m. She chose the portal because it was the channel linked from her receipt email and because she hoped to arrange a pickup of the heavy box from her apartment. The portal accepted her order number and the reason code "does not fit," then told her that large items must be returned to a store. It offered no way to describe the problem and no suggestion of units that would fit her window. At 9:30 a.m. she opened the website's chat to ask whether the store could collect the box. A buyer who moves from a form to a chat has already decided the form will not solve her problem, and that is what happened here.
The Response, Step by Step
The timeline below records each step of Keystone's response, with its time and the actor responsible.
The timeline shows that the recovery had two distinct phases. On Monday, the automated portal and the chat agent applied policy as written and warned of a restocking fee. On Tuesday, a store manager used discretion to waive it. The outcome therefore depended on which employee the buyer reached and on her willingness to ask twice.
| Time | Actor | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| Mon 9:20 a.m. | Online return portal | Accepted reason code; required in-store return for large items |
| Mon 9:30 a.m. | Chat assistant (automated) | Offered return policy links; transferred to an agent after three minutes |
| Mon 9:44 a.m. | Chat agent | Confirmed store return; said opened large appliances may carry a 15 percent restocking fee unless defective |
| Mon 9:52 a.m. | Chat agent | Declined to waive the fee in chat; suggested asking at the store |
| Tue 10:02 a.m. | Automated email | Asked the buyer to rate the unit she was returning |
| Tue 5:30 p.m. | Store return desk associate | Said the fee applied to opened boxes; called a manager |
| Tue 5:44 p.m. | Store manager | Waived the fee because the listing lacked window type; approved full refund |
| Tue 5:56 p.m. | Store return desk associate | Refunded $376.92 to the card; handed over a 10 percent off coupon |
What Was Offered
The final offer, recorded exactly, was a full refund of $376.92 to the original card, the waiver of a restocking fee that would have been about $52 on the $349 unit, a verbal apology from the manager and a coupon for 10 percent off a future purchase. No offer was made to collect the unit from the apartment, to reimburse the cost of travel or to credit the difference between the portable unit she had bought on Monday and the window unit she originally wanted.
The Verdict: Was the Buyer Made Whole?
Smith et al. (1999) found that customers judge a recovery on three kinds of fairness: distributive justice, the fairness of the outcome; procedural justice, the fairness of the process, including speed and ease; and interactional justice, the fairness of how they were treated. Tax et al. (1998) reached a similar conclusion from customers' descriptions of complaint experiences and found all three dimensions affected satisfaction with how complaints were handled.
On distributive justice, the outcome was mostly fair in money. Tasha received every dollar she paid. It was not fair in time. Her losses from the failure included a night away from home, the Sunday evening trip across the city, the Monday search and purchase of a second unit and the Tuesday return trip of about 40 minutes plus 26 minutes at the desk. The coupon did not address any of these, and since she had already bought a replacement, it had little value to her. On procedural justice, the recovery was weak. The portal was a dead end, the chat raised the threat of a fee for a problem the retailer had caused, and the fee was waived only after she asked a second time in person. On interactional justice, the recovery was good: each person she dealt with was courteous, and the manager acknowledged the listing's gap.
The buyer was therefore made whole on money but not on time or effort, and only because she persisted. A buyer who accepted the chat agent's answer would have lost about $52 on top of everything else.
What the Recovery Reveals
Some managers hope that a strong recovery can leave a customer more loyal than if nothing had gone wrong, an idea called the service recovery paradox. Pooled results across dozens of studies supported that effect on satisfaction but not on repurchase intentions or word of mouth (de Matos et al., 2007), which suggests that even a good recovery rarely makes up for the failure itself. In this case the recovery was not strong enough to test the idea. Its main lesson is that Keystone's front line could recognize that the failure came from the listing, as the manager did, but its automated channels could not. The review request that arrived while the return was pending confirms that the systems did not share what the buyer had reported. A fix at the source, the listing, would prevent the failure; a fix in the return policy, allowing fee waivers for fit problems caused by missing information, would make recovery fair without depending on who the buyer happens to reach.
References
de Matos, C. A., Henrique, J. L., & Rossi, C. A. V. (2007). Service recovery paradox: A meta-analysis. Journal of Service Research, 10(1), 60-77. https://doi.org/10.1177/1094670507303012
Smith, A. K., Bolton, R. N., & Wagner, J. (1999). A model of customer satisfaction with service encounters involving failure and recovery. Journal of Marketing Research, 36(3), 356-372. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224379903600305
Tax, S. S., Brown, S. W., & Chandrashekaran, M. (1998). Customer evaluations of service complaint experiences: Implications for relationship marketing. Journal of Marketing, 62(2), 60-76. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224299806200205
Reading the BU 242 Unit 7 instructions
The Unit 7 instructions ask you to analyze how a company responded to a service or product failure. Most versions want the failure described, the customer's complaint and channel explained, the company's response laid out in order and the outcome evaluated. Many rubrics ask you to use a framework, such as justice theory, to judge the recovery. You may be asked what the company should have done differently. The failure can be small, but it should be specific and documented. Most students write a compact APA 7 paper, and it works best when it continues the purchase studied in earlier units.
How this BU 242 Unit 7 example is built
The sample begins with the failure stated plainly: what was promised, what was delivered and when the buyer noticed. It then explains why she chose the return portal and why she moved to chat when the portal failed. An eight-row timeline records each response step, its time and the actor, from the automated portal to the store manager. The offer is written down to the dollar, along with what was not offered. The verdict applies three kinds of fairness, outcome, process and treatment, and finds the recovery strong on money and courtesy but weak on process and time. A final section draws on research about the recovery paradox and proposes fixes at the listing and in the return policy.
Where the points sit in the BU 242 Unit 7 rubric
A Herzing rubric for this unit tends to assess the description of the failure, the documentation of the response, the evaluation of the recovery and the recommendations, along with writing quality. Full points on description require a clear statement of what was promised and what happened. Documentation is judged by a timeline with specific times and actors rather than a general account. The evaluation criterion carries the most weight and rewards papers that apply a framework, compare the remedy with the full loss and avoid judging by politeness alone. The sample's use of three fairness dimensions and its accounting of time lost address this. Recommendations score well when they target the cause of the failure, not only the complaint process.
BU 242 Unit 7 help: mistakes that cost points
The most common Unit 7 weakness is judging a recovery by how friendly staff were, which ignores whether the customer's loss was repaired. Another is leaving out the customer's time and effort when comparing the remedy with the loss. Students often describe the response in general terms without times or actors, which makes the process impossible to evaluate. Some papers blame individual employees for problems caused by policy or systems. Frameworks are named but not applied. Finally, remember that a refund is not always the end of the story; the sample notes that the review request contradicted the pending return and that the fee waiver depended on reaching the right person.
Get a BU 242 Unit 7 example written to your instructions
Send the Unit 7 instructions and the rubric in your BU 242 classroom, with the scenario if your section supplies one. We write a custom example that states the failure first, treats the reporting channel as evidence, times every step with an actor named and counts the buyer's own hours in the loss. First custom sample free, back in 24 to 48 hours.
More BU 242 papers and business management samples
- BU 242 Unit 1: Customer value concepts paper
- BU 242 Unit 2: Segment definition
- BU 242 Unit 3: Purchase-path map
- BU 242 Unit 4: Pain point analysis
- BU 242 Unit 5: Value proposition
- BU 242 Unit 6: Digital touchpoint audit
- BU 242 Unit 8: Improvement recommendation
- BU 106 Unit 7: Business ethics case
- BU 217 Unit 7: Real case analysis
- BU 231 Unit 7: Risk and mitigation paper
- BU 302 Unit 7: Organizational culture read
BU 242 Unit 7 questions, answered
Does the failure have to be a large one?
No, and a small one is often easier to work with because the whole sequence fits inside a document. A missing item, a wrong size, a charge that appeared twice: each produces a promise, a breach, a report and a response, which is everything the analysis needs. Size matters less than whether you can time the steps and state plainly what was lost.
What if the company never responded?
That is a complete case and often a sharper one. Record the report, the acknowledgment if there was one, and the silence with dates at both ends. A recovery that never begins can be measured against the same standard as one that does, and the closing question about whether the buyer returned tends to answer itself.
Can I use a complaint I handled at work?
No. What a customer said to your employer, what the resolution cost and how the case was recorded belong to the employer, whatever your role in it happened to be. Take a failure you met as a customer of some other business, or build a composite from the pattern you know and label it composite in the opening.
Where can I find a free BU 242 Unit 7 sample paper?
The finished BU 242 Unit 7 service recovery analysis, including its timeline and verdict, is posted above free to read. If your failure case is different, send the prompt and the desk will prepare a free custom analysis for it, normally back within 48 hours.
What framework works for BU 242 Unit 7?
Justice theory is the most common choice. The sample judges the recovery on the fairness of the outcome, the process and the treatment the buyer received, drawing on two well-known studies. Whatever framework you use, apply each part to your case rather than defining it and moving on.