Online complaint handling practices: Company strategies and their effects upon post-complaint satisfaction
Year: 2015
Type: preprint
Abstract: The present study aimed to examine (1) the nature of firms’ complaint-handling practices in an online double-deviation context, and (2) the relationship between complaint-handling practices on the one hand and customer post-complaint satisfaction on the other. Predictions were derived from justice theory and existing research and practice concerning the attributes of effective organizational complaint-handling. 523 naturally occurring exchanges between complainants and 179 firms were coded and content analyzed. Descriptive analyses showed that best practices for complaint-handling were infrequent, and that poor complaint-handling practices occurred in comparable proportions to best practices. Findings from a multinomial regression analysis demonstrated that the practice most strongly associated with post-complaint satisfaction related to the provision of evidence that the complainant’s problem had been, or was about to be, solved. Moreover, of the four (marginally) significant relationships between pre-established attributes of perceived justice and customer satisfaction, three pertained to practices that destroy customer-seller relationships. The implications of the findings for research and practice are discussed.
Author: Pierre-Nicolas Schwab
Language: English
Subfield: Marketing
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1601576065