Customer Compliance/Customer Control

Abstract

“Customer compliance” refers to interactions between customers and providers with clear norms and processes of interaction being predefined by providers and enforced by them in an inflexible manner, in the process of doing so normalizing customer behavior. Compliance is a type of control over customers that does not rest on open, visible, and brute force but on more subtle efforts on the part of providers to channel customers' behaviors, especially of customers who are perceived as “difficult” and economically unprofitable. Compliance, or governing customer behavior through restriction, affects all stages of service provision but is particularly prominent in service recovery and complaint management when customer compliance businesses do not invest considerable resources and effort to satisfy dissatisfied customers and especially difficult and serial complainers. Customer compliance‐practicing companies sometimes publicize their compliance procedures in order to “inform” and “educate” customers about these procedures, but also so that to “train” customers to behave in a manner acceptable to these companies. The concept of customer compliance challenges philosophical and ideological marketing claims of liberated and empowered consumers as well as the service dominant logic, by emphasizing not the liberating but the constricting properties of interactions and service provision.

Service Excellence in Marketing for Firms

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“…Understanding quality perceptions in bundled and customer compliant services raises additional complexities. The notion of a gap between expectations and perceptions makes little sense for a customer who has agreed in advance to comply with a set of terms and conditions [17]. The exact scope of quality evaluation in the case of bundled services (for example, data and communication services) may be difficult to determine.…”

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