Complaint management on the polish financial market – the dimensions of customer evaluation

Abstract

Justice theory appears to be dominant theoretical framework applied to complaint handling. A three-dimensional view of the concept of justice has evolved over time to include distributive justice (dealing with decision outcomes), procedural justice (dealing with decision-making procedures), and interactional justice (dealing with interpersonal behavior in the enactment of procedures and delivery of outcomes). However, a few recent studies analyze the impact of perceived justice which include informational justice (adequacy and truthfulness of information delivered to a customer) as an independent variable. Also, a lack of consistency, among some of the categories falling within particular justice, can be observed. Perceived justice concept has not been tested yet with regard to concentrated service sectors and business reality of post-communist European countries. As a result this paper aims at verifying the extent to which perceived justice is multidimensional from a perspective of financial institutes' clients in Poland. The research was conducted on the sample of 400 customers. There is a support to use a four-dimension model. There were some new constructs found, which enrich measures of justice, e.g.: providing the client with the possibility of choosing compensation, a single-person complaint handling, the competence of the personnel. The results are interpreted in relation to other research related to this issue and prior own qualitative study.