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Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
Published in: Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science 3/2010

01-06-2010 | Original Empirical Research

On the importance of complaint handling design: a multi-level analysis of the impact in specific complaint situations

Authors: Christian Homburg, Andreas Fürst, Nicole Koschate

Published in: Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science | Issue 3/2010

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Abstract

Given the large investments required for high-quality complaint handling design, managers need practical guidance in understanding its actual importance for their particular company. However, while prior research emphasizes the general relevance of complaint handling design, it fails to provide a more differentiated perspective on this interesting issue. This study, which is based on an integrative multi-level framework and a dyadic dataset, addresses this important gap in research. Results indicate that the impact of a company’s complaint handling design varies significantly depending on the characteristics of the complaining customers with which the firm has to deal. Further, this paper shows that, contingent on these characteristics, a company’s complaint handling design can shape complainants’ fairness perceptions either considerably or only slightly. Overall, findings suggest that companies should apply an adaptive approach to complaint handling to avoid misallocation of attention, energy, and resources.
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Appendix
Available only for authorised users
Footnotes
1
These findings remain stable when estimating a model that only includes main effects, but no cross-level interaction terms.
 
2
Moreover, additional analyses show that for both groups of each customer-related characteristic, the estimate for the effect of complaint handling design on perceived fairness is significant.
 
3
While our study focuses on the moderating effects of customer characteristics on the impact of a company’s complaint handling design, it is worth mentioning that the interaction effects in our model (see Table 5) can also be interpreted in the opposite way. Specifically, our study also advances academic understanding by suggesting that a company’s complaint handling design influences the impact of customer characteristics. For example, the higher the quality of company’s complaint handling design, the lower is the negative effect of a customer’s perceived severity of the problem, importance of the product, and attribution of responsibility, respectively, on perceived fairness. Thus, high-quality complaint handling may weaken the impact of customer perceptions of the problem. A similar reasoning can be applied to reinterpreting the other interaction effects.
 
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Metadata
Title
On the importance of complaint handling design: a multi-level analysis of the impact in specific complaint situations
Authors
Christian Homburg
Andreas Fürst
Nicole Koschate
Publication date
01-06-2010
Publisher
Springer US
Published in
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science / Issue 3/2010
Print ISSN: 0092-0703
Electronic ISSN: 1552-7824
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-009-0172-y

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