2020/06/23 by Forrest V. Morgeson, G. Tomas M. Hult, Sunil Mithas +2 · 115 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · #Business #Competition (biology) #Complaint #Consumer Retail Behavior Studies #Customer Service Quality and Loyalty #Customer advocacy #Customer delight #Customer retention #Customer satisfaction #Loyalty #Loyalty business model #Marketing #Product (mathematics) #Securities Regulation and Market Practices #Service (business) #Service quality
paper · doi:10.1177/0022242920929029
published in Journal of Marketing 84(5), 79-99 (SAGE Publishing)
openalex publication_date 2020/06/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/03
Firms spend substantial resources responding to customer complaints, and the marketing profession has a long history of supporting that enterprise to promote customer loyalty. The authors question whether this response is always warranted or whether its effectiveness instead depends on economic, industry, customer–firm, product/service, and customer segment factors that may alter the firm’s incentives to compete on complaint management. To consider this question, they integrate economic and marketing theories and investigate factors that influence the complaint recovery–customer loyalty relationship via a sample of 35,597 complaining customers spanning a ten-year period across economic sectors, industries, and firms. Overall, the authors find that the recovery–loyalty relationship is stronger in faster-growing economies, for industries with more competition, for luxury products, and for customers with higher satisfaction and higher expectations of customization. Conversely, the recovery–loyalty relationship is weaker when customers’ expectations of product/service reliability are higher, for manufactured goods, and for men compared with women. The authors discuss implications of these results for managers, policy makers, and researchers for more effective management of customer complaints.