The Relationship between Complaints, Emotion, Anger, and Subsequent Behavior of Customers

Abstract

The quality of a company's long term relationship with its customers is chiefly dependent on such company's long term viability. Organizations today are faced with the task of not only attracting new customers, but also the problems of keeping the existing ones. In other to attain and retain a pool of devoted and profitable customers, companies seek to provide an unblemished high quality products and service to their customers (Kotler and Armstrong, 2006). Nonetheless, as hard as they try, even the best companies cannot totally eradicate problems (Gursoy, Ekiz, and Chi, 2007); as most companies only hear few of these problems through consumer complaints (Hedrick, Beverland, and Minahan, 2007); therefore, one major factor that distinguishes between successful companies from the non successful ones is how they view and handle these complaints (Zemke and Anderson, 2007). This paper is to enable consumer scientists, consumer consultants, consumer behaviour researchers and those with the responsibility of handling consumer complaints to explore and understand consumer complaint behaviour in its entirety. Consumer anger can result in behaviors that cost organizations money and damage the consumer-to-firm (C2F) relationship (Huefner and Hunt, 2000), as consumers will experience certain emotions, as such emotion is characterized by specific evaluations of situations. These emotions then influence how consumers will respond to the situation; whether an emotion is positive or negative depends on the emotion specificity approach focuses on the specific nature of emotions of equivalent valence (Rucker and Petty, 2004).

Role of Consumer Psychological Studies in Fast Food Industry

“…The negative emotions in customer's mind arise from many sources and they become a source of learning opportunity to companies (Van, 2016). If companies' services for customers do not match with their perception, then customer becomes angry and dissatisfy there (Iyiola & Ibidunni, 2013). So, this anger of customer leads toward dis-satisfaction and only well trained marketing employee can handle this situation and turn back the customer on company's platform for further business (Glikson et al, 2019;Cheshin et al, 2018;Jerger & Wirtz, 2017).…”

Exploring the Role of Complaint Handling among Complaining Consumers

“…Complaints help the company to identify the customer problem and reestablish their lost trust (Claro et al, 2014). If complaints are resolved satisfactorily it will lead to trust, commitment and long-term relationship with the service provider; however, if they are not resolved properly, it will promote consumer mistrust towards the organization (Iyiola & Ibidunni, 2013). Effective complaint handling influences customer's emotions and loyalty towards the firm (Svari et al, 2010).…”

“…Organizations build consumer trust and loyalty through long-term relationships and a single service failure incident does not erode all the goodwill consumer has for the organization. However, prior positive experiences of the consumer also do not completely remove the negative effects of service failure from consumer's mind and it can have an effect on their future repurchase intentions (Iyiola & Ibidunni, 2013). Usually, having a high percentage of voice complaint intention signifies that a consumer has loyalty towards the retailer.…”

The Influence of Psychographic Variables on the Theory of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty of Customer Complaints Behaviour in Banks

“…al., 2002;Donoghu & De Klerk, 2006;Ofori-Okyere & Kumadey, 2015: Iyiola & Ibidunni, 2013 have come to recognize the contributions of Hirschman's Theory of Exit, Voice and Loyalty to the study of CCB worldwide. The theory hypothesizes that customer complaint behaviour depends on the value of voicing the complaint, the probability that the complaint will be successful, and on the ability and willingness to take up the voice, and that exit is often a last resort (Blodgett et.al, 1993).…”

“…In Africa as well as Ghana, Customer Complaints Behaviour is understudied, as few researchers like (Donoghu & De Klerk, 2006;Petzer & Moslert, 2012;Iyiola & Ibidunni, 2013;Nimako & Mensah, 2014;Ofori-Okyere & Kumadey, 2015) have studied CCB on the continent. The few studies conducted on the continent not moved beyond, improving of the customer complaints and loyalty in the telecommination sector, Uganda (Komunda, Kibeera, Munyoki & Byarugaba, 2015), exploring customer dissatisfaction/satifaction and complaining responsess among bank customers, Ghana (Nimako & Mensah, 2014), dissatisfaction and complaining responses towards mobile telephony service, Ghana (Mensah & Nimako, 2012), complaints behaviourand product failure, South Africa (Donoghu & De Klerk, 2006) complaints emotion, anger, and subsequent behaviourof customers, Nigeria (Iyiola & Ibidunni, 2013) service failure and customer compalints management in the health sector, Ghana (Ofori-Okyere & Kumadey, 2015), attitude towards and likelihood of complaining in the banking, domestic airline and restaurant industry (Petzer & Moslert, 2012). It is obvious that, little has been studied on how psychographic variables: justice of success, self-confidence and willingness, conservatism, assertiveness, attitude towards complaints, and attitude towards businesses in general influence complaints CCB of (complainers and non-complainers) based on the three characteristics of Hirschman's theory (1970): Voice, Exit and Loyalty.…”