Customer Evaluations of Service Complaint Experiences: Implications for Relationship Marketing

Abstract

Many companies consider investments in complaint handling as means of increasing customer commitment and building customer loyalty. Firms are not well informed, however, on how to deal successfully with service failures or the impact of complaint handling strategies. In this study, the authors find that a majority of complaining customers were dissatisfied with recent complaint handling experiences. Using justice theory, the authors also demonstrate that customers evaluate complaint incidents in terms of the outcomes they receive, the procedures used to arrive at the outcomes, and the nature of the interpersonal treatment during the process. In turn, the authors develop and test competing hypotheses regarding the interplay between satisfaction with complaint handling and prior experience in shaping customer trust and commitment. The results support a quasi “brand equity” perspective—whereas satisfaction with complaint handling has a direct impact on trust and commitment, prior positive experiences mitigate, to a limited extent, the effects of poor complaint handling. Implications for managers and scholars are discussed.

Importance of relationship quality and communication on foodservice for the elderly

“…The significant results of the proposed model were consistent with the findings in the literature: the path from service quality to satisfaction [18,16,32], the path from satisfaction to trust [13,32,36], and the path from commitment to behavioral intention [10,19,33] were statistically significant. Elderly who rated service quality as high were more likely to have high satisfaction scores for foodservice and a high level of commitment.…”

“…According to Tax, Brown and Chandrashekaran [13], both trust and commitment were significant consequences of satisfaction with complaint handling. A high level of satisfaction provided a customer with repeated positive reinforcement, creating commitment-inducing emotional bonds [14].…”

Model Misspecification: Contrasting Formative and Reflective Indicators for a Model of E-Service Quality

“…The survey, excluding the eight refl ective indicators collected for model identifi cation purposes, consisted of 65 items: 25 process quality items, 9 outcome quality items, 20 recovery items, 7 satisfaction and behavioral intentions items, and 4 demographic items. The process and outcome quality items for this instrument were borrowed from existing service quality research (Bienstock, Mentzer, and Bird 1997;Mentzer, Flint, and Hult 2001;Zeithaml, Parasuraman, and Malhotra 2000) and the recovery quality items were borrowed from Tax, Brown, and Chandrashekaran (1998).…”

“…Based on the justice literature (Tax, Brown, and Chandrashekaran 1998), there are three fi rst-order constructs that form the recovery quality dimension-interactive fairness, procedural fairness, and distributive fairness. Interactive fairness is the customer's ability to locate and interact with technology support on a retailer's Web site.…”

Investigating the Key Routes to Customer Delight

“…It is placed in the cognitive section because of the dominance of disconfirmation and justice theories in assessing service recovery Swan 1989a, 1989b;Tax, Brown, and Chandrashekaran 1998).…”