Complaint Intention of Dissatisfied Customers: The Moderating Role of Affective Commitment and Complaint Barriers

Abstract

Over the past decade, many studies have provided various findings on how to manage service failures and related recovery attempts. These studies have provided insight into consumer perceptions of the service recovery. However, all recovery efforts are contingent upon one key assumption: a customer voicing the complaint. The fact that up to 95% of customers never register their complaint following a failure makes this problem even more serious. Given the critical need for encouraging customer complaints, it is surprising that only few studies investigate factors that may prompt consumers to complain or remain silent. This paper highlights Hirschman’s theory of exit, voice, and loyalty as the basic framework of consumer behavior after service failures. In line with this reasoning, our research assesses consumer dissatisfaction response style and investigates perceived justice of firms’ recovery attempts. More precisely, we test the following three hypotheses in a 2 (low vs. high affective commitment) X 2 (low vs. high complaint barrier) X 2 (restaurant- and a fashion retail setting) consumer experiment with 280 subjects.