An Empirical Study on Customer Complaint Behavior

Abstract

The central focus of the study is to capture the general disposition of consumers to exit in case of dissatisfaction. A conceptual model was developed with personality and situational factors to comprehensively understand the determinants of consumer’s tendency to exit (TE) amidst complaints and to assess the psychometric properties of the conceptual model across three service sectors i.e.,hotel, automobile, and organized retail stores. For the data analysis structuralequation modeling and multi-group invariance analysis was used.The results highlighted the significant impact of personality factors on consumer’s attitude toward complaining (ATC). Further, ATC and situational factors i.e., perceived likelihood of successful complaint and ease of complaint process has a significant negative impact on consumer's TE whereas, discouraging subjective norms, lower perceived switching cost, poor employee response, and negative past experience have a significant positive impact on consumers TE. Next, study aims to predict consumer complaint status (complainers or non-complainers) based on socio-demographic and psychographic factors and further to discern the differences in behavior disposition of consumer groups concerning determinants of consumer’s TE.Chi-square automatic interaction detector (CHAID) decision tree analysis was used to profile consumers.Results indicated that occupation; income; education; industry and ATC were significant factors in profiling consumers as complainers or non-complainers. Further, determinants of TE vary significantly across the groups of complainers and non-complainers. Further, this study explored the impact of employee social, emotional, and professional competencies on their service recovery performance. Also, the study focuses on the mediation of the relationship by internal marketing and moderation by industry. Results revealed that employee competencies influenced service recovery performance. The relationship was mediated by internal marketing. The industry was found a significant moderator that moderates the mediated path by internal marketing between employee competencies and service recovery performance.