DGSB - Research News
The influence of guarantees, active requests to voice and failure severity on customer complaint behaviour
Dr Nichola Robertson and Dr Lisa McQuilken
Anecdotal evidence suggests that service guarantees and active requests by service workers to complain encourage customers to voice directly to organisations following service failure, while holding negative word of mouth and exit at bay.
The first empircial test of this proposition was undertaken by Dr Lisa McQuilken and Dr Nichola Robertson. The researchers conducted an experiment in which they examined the influence of these devices on customer complaint behavior (CCB) across restaurant failures of varying severity.
Findings reported in McQuilken and Robertson's paper suggest that offering a service guarantee encourages customer voice, which has been shown to positively influence an organisation's relationships with its customers. Failure severity had the strongest influence on CCB, and it interacted with both active request and guarantee type in influencing exit.
