Proactive Complaint Management: Effects of Customer Voice Initiation on Perceived Justices, Satisfaction, and Negative Word-of-Mouth

Abstract

Customer complaint or customer voice has been recognized as a key response to service failure that activates service recovery. This study aims at investigating how managing customer voice affects service recovery evaluation. Building on the concept of initiation, this study conceptualizes three conditions of service recovery, namely, service recovery based on customer-initiated voice, service recovery based on firm-initiated voice, and service recovery based on no voice. Using an experimental design, the present study investigates how customer evaluations of service recovery vary across voice initiation conditions. The multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) reveals that firm-initiated voice, compared with customer-initiated voice, elevates customer perceived justice and satisfaction while diminishing negative word-of-mouth intention. The research findings emphasize the necessity to activate customer’s voice following a service encounter so that service failure can be identified and addressed, which helps in improving customer evaluation of service recovery attempts.

Service recovery efforts' influence on consumers' desire to reciprocate and forgiveness: the mediating role of perceived justice

“…compensation and prompt response) are manifestations of perceived justice. In other words, justice perceptions reflect consumers' assessment of service recovery efforts (Ampong et al, 2020;Nuansi and Ngamcharoenmongkol, 2021;Rifi and Mostafa, 2022). Subsequently, the literature suggests that recovery efforts should be designed in a way that they should evoke perceived fairness in consumers (Tahir, 2021).…”