Customer satisfaction with complaint responses under the moderation of involvement

Abstract

Organizations build competitive advantage when they design recovery framework with recourse to disgusted customers, given that no two failure experiences are the same. This paper proposed a framework that links user-involvement to customer satisfaction with five complaint response instruments, and specifically, provides insight into how the relational and interactive effects of personal involvement in service-failure encounters create post-recovery satisfaction. Unstructured and semi-structured interviews were conducted with mobile-telephone subscribers/teachers from Federal Government Colleges (FGCs) in the South-Eastern, Nigeria. The findings show that regularity and significance of felt ordeals, and the service-officer’s willingness to interface with disgusted customers were antecedents of social interactions, socio-economic satisfaction, and positive word-of-mouth. However, the findings affirm the proposed framework, conform to the expectations of socio-emotional selectivity theory, and show that customer characteristics, user-involvement, failure-contexts, and providers’ interface to influence satisfaction with failure/recovery experiences. Based on the decay-time of the effects of recovery instruments, the paper recommended proactive and/or reactive approaches, especially on the recognition that failures driven by low-involvement features demand affective and non-pecuniary recoveries, as well as immediate and cumulative satisfaction; and those driven by high-involvement go for a hybrid of utilitarian and symbolic response interventions.