How Customer-Company Identification and Self-Construal Predict Service Recovery Expectations and Complaints: An Extended Abstract

Abstract

It is hard to overstate the importance of service recovery. One estimation is that companies lose $83 billion annually from bad customer service (Loechner 2010). At the same time, emerging research and practice has begun to focus on moving customers from being merely satisfied to being connected with a company at a deeper level. As an example, consider customer-company identification (CCI), which represents the extent a customer thinks and feels a company represents cherished aspects of his or her self. CCI is highly motivating, such that a customer willingly supports a company through identity sustaining (e.g., patronage) and promoting (e.g., word-of-mouth) behaviors.