Service failure handling and outpatient loyalty amongst private hospitals in Obio-Akpor LGA, Rivers State.

Frankly speaking, customers’ perception of satisfaction and loyalty is basically anchored on their evaluation of all the actions put in place by service providers to ensure service failure is resolved. Service failure is said to have been handled when recovery processes meet or exceed the expectation of the customer. The thrust of this paper, therefore, was to ascertain if there is a relationship between service failure handling and outpatient loyalty amongst private hospitals in Obio Akpor, Rivers State. Using a structured questionnaire, primary data was collected from 200 outpatients of these private hospitals and data were analyzed using multiple regression statistic, with the aid of SPSS version 23.1. The study concludes that the dimensions of service failure handling (Attentiveness and Response Speed) relate to outpatient loyalty. Hence, this paper recommends that private hospitals desiring improved patient loyalty should implement speedy and attentive responses when service failures occur.