Online complaint handling practices: Company strategies and their effects upon post-complaint satisfaction

Pierre-Nicolas Schwab

No 15-005, Working Papers CEB from ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles

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.

Keywords: complaint-handling; online; double-deviation; perceived justice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: M31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 47 p.
Date: 2015-02-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mkt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published by:

Downloads: (external link)
https://dipot.ulb.ac.be/dspace/bitstream/2013/192612/1/wp15005.pdf wp15005 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sol:wpaper:2013/192612

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://hdl.handle.ne ... lb.ac.be:2013/192612

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers CEB from ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Benoit Pauwels ().