This study attempts to present a process of customers’ forgiveness through authenticity,not that of recovery through equity, in case of service failure. Prior researches on service recovery have discussed relations between equity, recovery satisfaction, and positive customer behavior, emphasizing that customers’ recognition of equity in the efforts of recovery was important most of all to recover from service failure. However, psychologists suggested that authentic recovery efforts and the process of recognizing, understanding, and forgiving this by the other, not fair one-to-one interaction, were important most of all to recover personal relationship when material and psychological damage was experienced in the relationship. Perception of equity in the process of service recovery concerns whether service efforts are partial or fair, which is different from customers’ understanding and forgiveness of situations where failure occurs. Even if one experienced recovery satisfaction through recognition of equity and formed positive behavior intention, true relationship recovery can hardly be obtained and positive customer behavior can possibly fail to be induced constantly from a long-term perspective. Therefore, this study tries to examine the process of customers’ service recovery in the psychological aspect, not in the cognitive one, and to present the process of customers’forgiveness in such a psychological aspect. Forgiveness brings transformation into cognitive and behavioral systems, consequently changing negative thinking, emotion, and behavior into positive ones. This is because forgiveness, which is movement of the mind, not that of reasons, affects favorable relationships with the other from a long-term perspective as well as reducing revenge behavior against the other. The purpose of this study is first to see how recovery efforts following service failure affect customer empathy. For this purpose, I try to introduce the notion of authenticity to suggest that it is an important element to arouse customer empathy. Second, I try to see how customer empathy following service recovery efforts affects forgiveness. If customers can empathize with service companies’ failure through the companies’ recovery efforts, I try to see if such empathy can lead to customer forgiveness of failure. In doing so, I try to present the process of customers’ forgiveness of failure, Third, I try to see how customer forgiveness affects revenge behavior, such as negative word-of-mouth, and avoidance behavior, such as revisit intention. Forgiveness reduces revenge and avoidance behavior against the other. So I try to see if customers’ forgiveness of company failure can reduce their negative behavior. Fourth, I try to determine relevance between recovery satisfaction of the cognitive process,customer empathy of the psychological process, and forgiveness and to examine differences in relative influences on customer behavior. In doing so, I try to present the optimum strategy to induce positive customer behavior despite service failure. The results showed that authenticity for service recovery efforts affected customer empathy with service failure, which then affected forgiveness. Customer forgiveness reduced revenge and avoidance behavior, increased revisit intention, and reduced negative word-of-mouth intention. As for relations between recovery satisfaction, empathy, and forgiveness, empathy exerted higher relative influences on forgiveness than recovery satisfaction; as for relative influences of recovery satisfaction and forgiveness on customer behavior, forgiveness exerted higher relative influences on negative word-of-mouth than recovery satisfaction. Therefore,forgiveness was found to be a factor to reduce negative word-of-mouth intention more than recovery satisfaction. The results demonstrate that customer understanding and forgiveness through authenticity is an important factor to consider in service recovery, in addition to recovery satisfaction through equity. In other words, what is important in service recovery is not how fair recovery efforts are but how authentic the effort are, which can induce customer empathy and lead to customer forgiveness of company failure. This indicates that future researches on service recovery need to make scientific and practical considerations of the process of forgiveness through authenticity, not through equity.