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An executive summary for managers and executive readers can be found at the end of this article.
Complaint management has been considered an important tool for managers to deal with failures, especially in the services sector, where customers evaluate a performance and not a tangible product ([27] Grönroos, 1988; [68] Stauss and Seidel, 2004). Because most of the customers do not complain when they experience dissatisfaction derived from a service failure ([70] Tax and Brown, 1998), but just change the service provider, it becomes clear that monitoring customer satisfaction over time is not enough. Companies must better understand how customers react to service failure and to the service providers' efforts towards recovery.
In the services marketing literature, research about service failure and recovery has investigated:
- how customers react to different levels of problem severity and service recovery ([47] Maxham, 2001; [65] Smith and Bolton, 1998);
- the impact of relationship type on customer loyalty ([44] Mattila, 2001);
- whether a highly satisfying service recovery encounter enhances a customer's overall satisfaction with a service organization, known as the "recovery paradox" ([47] Maxham, 2001; [50] McCollough et al. , 2000; [49] McCollough, 1995; [51] Michel, 2001; [65] Smith and Bolton, 1998); and
- how customers perceptions vary over time ([48] Maxham and Netemeyer, 2002).
More specifically, recent developments in this literature have considered attitude toward complaining (ATC) as an important variable to better understand the drivers of complaint intentions ([73] Voorhees and Brady, 2005). ATC is defined as "the [customers'] overall affect of the 'goodness' or 'badness' of complaining to sellers and is not specific to a given episode of dissatisfaction" ([64] Singh and Wilkes, 1996, p. 353). Thus, ATC is not restricted to specific situations of dissatisfaction, but it is the individual's general predisposition toward seeking redress from sellers once dissatisfaction with a product or service is experienced ([13] Bodey and Grace, 2007; [38] Kim et al. , 2003; [61] Richins, 1987).
A moderating role has been proposed for ATC, based on the attitude theory of reasoned action ([22] Fishbein and Ajzen, 1975), predicting that these predisposed attitudes would moderate the effects of dissatisfaction responses on intentions to complain ([73] Voorhees and Brady, 2005). But at the same time, despite the robustness of the attitude...