The Forgiving Customer: Commitment, Intentions, and Behavior after Critical Incidents

Previous research in complaint management has assessed the role of commitment after service failures. It can be expected that affectively committed customers will be more likely to complain due to their sense of belonging to the company. Furthermore, several studies suggest reducing perceived complaint barriers, e.g. by offering various communication channels, will increase a customer’s propensity to voice a complaint. What has not been investigated is the interplay between complaint barriers and customer commitment. Moreover, it remains largely unknown if committed customers behave differently from less committed customers in their reaction to service recovery efforts. This study – comprising of two experiments – attempts to fill that gap in the literature and test the following hypotheses which are based on Hirschman’s (1970) theory of exit, voice, and loyalty: H1 A low level of complaint barriers have a positive impact on complaint intention. H2 Affective commitment has a positive impact on complaint intention.