Customers who are satisfied with how a company resolves a service issue may regard that company more positively than they...

Sentence Structure

First sentence:

• Customers
  • who are satisfied with how a company resolves a service issue
• may regard that company more positively
  • than they would if no such issue had occurred.

Second sentence:

• This idea
• is known as the service recovery paradox [?, and / ?]
• research suggests that it has important implications for customer loyalty and retention.

Understanding the Meaning

Let's start by understanding what the first sentence tells us:

• "Customers who are satisfied with how a company resolves a service issue"
  • We're talking about customers who had a problem BUT the company fixed it well

• "may regard that company more positively than they would if no such issue had occurred"
  • Here's the interesting part - these customers might actually feel BETTER about the company than if nothing had gone wrong in the first place!
  • That's counterintuitive - you'd think having no problem would be best

Now the second sentence starts:

• "This idea is known as the service recovery paradox"
  • So this counterintuitive phenomenon has a name

This is where we have the blank. Let's look at our choices:

• Choice A: just a comma
• Choice B: no punctuation at all
• Choice C: comma and "and"
• Choice D: "and" and comma

To see what works here, let's read the rest of the sentence and understand what it's saying!

The sentence continues:

• "research suggests that it has important implications for customer loyalty and retention"
  • Studies show this paradox matters for keeping customers and maintaining their loyalty

Now, what do we notice about the structure here?

Let's look at what comes before and after the blank:

• "This idea is known as the service recovery paradox"
  • This is a complete thought - it has a subject ("This idea") and a verb ("is known")
  • It could stand alone as its own sentence

• "research suggests that it has important implications for customer loyalty and retention"
  • This is ALSO a complete thought - it has a subject ("research") and a verb ("suggests")
  • It could also stand alone as its own sentence

So we have two complete thoughts that the sentence is joining together.

When you want to connect two complete thoughts into one sentence, you need a comma followed by a connecting word like "and."

So we need: paradox, and

The correct answer is Choice C.

Grammar Concept Applied

Connecting Two Complete Thoughts with a Comma + Connecting Word

When you have two complete thoughts (called independent clauses in grammar terms) - each with its own subject and verb that could stand alone as a sentence - and you want to join them into one sentence, you need to use a comma followed by a coordinating conjunction like "and," "but," "or," or "so."

The pattern looks like this:

Pattern: [Complete thought] , [and/but/or/so] [Complete thought]

Example 1:

• Complete thought 1: "The experiment succeeded"
• Complete thought 2: "The results were published in a major journal"
• Combined correctly: "The experiment succeeded, and the results were published in a major journal"

Example 2:

• Complete thought 1: "She studied for hours"
• Complete thought 2: "She still found the test challenging"
• Combined correctly: "She studied for hours, but she still found the test challenging"

In our question:

• Complete thought 1: "This idea is known as the service recovery paradox"
• Complete thought 2: "research suggests that it has important implications for customer loyalty and retention"
• Combined correctly: "This idea is known as the service recovery paradox, and research suggests that it has important implications for customer loyalty and retention"

The comma must come BEFORE the connecting word, not after it.