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Coping With Customer Complaints
Simon J. Bell, James A. Luddington,
First Published February 1, 2006 Research Article
Journal of Service Research
https://doi.org/10.1177/1094670505283785

Customer complaining behavior and its management are areas of great importance for businesses, especially where organizations are increasingly recognizing the value of pursuing long-term relationships with customers. Often discussed anecdotally is the fact that for every one complaining customer, there are perhaps as many as 20 others with the same problem who remain silent (Plymire 1991). This is particularly meaningful considering the powerful impact of “word of mouth” on a firm’s reputation and subsequent ability to retain customers (Reichheld and Sasser 1990). These issues, in turn, have helped focus organizations’ attention on the importance of complaint resolution. Many businesses now actively encourage complaints so that they have an opportunity for service recovery and improvement. Although this practice is widely accepted within organizations, often ignored is the impact of customer complaints on customer service employees, who are ultimately responsible for service delivery and recovery. Often, it is the service employee who is the target of customer complaints to the organization. yet we have little understanding of how this feedback affects employee performance and how employees cope.

The relationship between service employee feedback and performance has attracted a great deal of research attention. The vast majority of studies, however, have focused on feedback from sources inside the organization. These include supervisory feedback (Becker and Klimoski 1989; Sujan, Weitz, and Kumar 1994), coworker feedback (Ilgen, Fisher, and Taylor 1979; Kohli and Jaworski 1994), and self—administered feedback (Becker and Klimoski 1989; Ilgen, Fisher, and Taylor 1979). Despite some recent research attention (e. g.. Bell, Mengiic. and Stefani 2004; Ryan, Schmit, and Johnson 1996; Schneider, White, and Paul 1998), relatively little is known about customer feedback and its potential impact on employee attitudes and behaviors. This is surprising given the elevated status that customers are afforded by organizations. It is often suggested, in conceptual studies, that employees’ attitudes and future behaviors are likely to be affected by customer complaints (Blancero and Johnson 2001; Piercy 1995). Indeed, this relationship is a central tenet of Heskett and others’ (1994) service-profit chain. There is, however, very little empirical evidence available to support such assertions.

Clearly, there is a need to investigate further the effects of negative customer feedback on service employee performance. Equally, however, it is essential that practitioners and scholars consider some of the means by which service personnel cope with such feedback. Understanding how employees cope with complaining customers, such that service recovery is possible and job attitudes and behaviors are not compromised, is of critical importance. It is likely that employees’ personalities will play a significant role in determining their coping strategies. In particular, personal characteristics such as self-esteem, affectivity, locus of control, and self-efficacy will feature prominently in determining how employees deal with negative customer feedback (Basgall and Snyder 1988; Fedor 1991; George 1998). We seek to extend this area of research by considering the moderating role of service employee positive and negative affectivity on the relationship between customer complaints and employee commitment to customer service. A more detailed understanding of how affectivity moderates this relationship may inform the development of service personnel training programs as well as approaches to recruitment and selection.

DISCUSSION

A primary finding of this research is that customer complaints have a negative impact on service personnel commitment to customer service. This provides some primary empirical support for the theoretical arguments of several authors (e. g., Blancero and Johnson 2001; Piercy 1995). Although our results do not provide a direct test of the predictions of attribution and role theories, these theories can nonetheless suggest plausible explanations for this finding. As explained earlier, customer complaints may cause role conflict as they can reflect customer expectations of employee behaviors, which may differ from management or organizational expectations of behavior (Rizzo, House, and Litzman 1970). Customer service employees, in following managerial directives, are often in the unenviable position of delivering bad news to customers (e. g., notification of stock outs, inability to accept returned goods). Customer contact staff can become “sandwiched” between the expectations of management and the expectations of customers (Bell, Menguc, and Stefani 2004). This, we contend, is a major source of role confiict, which has a demoralizing effect. This was manifest in a reduction in commitment to customer service as a result of customer complaints.

Attribution inconsistencies may provide another explanation. Researchers have found that biases lead employees to underestimate their role in service failures and customers to overestimate the employees’ role (Bitner, Booms, and Mohr 1994; Folkes and Kotsos 1986; Groth, Gutek, and Douma 2001). The likely discrepancy between evaluations may result in the rejection of the feedback message (Fedor 1991). Thus, when the employee believes a complaint to be unfair, he or she may be more likely to reject the complaint and develop resentment toward the customer, consequently reducing his or her commitment to customer service.

The significant direct relationship between positive affectivity and commitment to customer service, contrasted with the insignificant role of negative affectivity, is an intriguing finding. Interpreted another way, positive affective states can increase customer service initiatives, whereas there are no negative implications of negative affectivity for commitment to customer service. Positive affectivity, through its relationship with organizational citizenship behaviors (Kelley and Hoffman 1997), may lead employees to explore additional ways in which they can help customers (Bell and Menguc 2002). Negative affective individuals, on the other hand, are likely to perform their minimum in-role job requirements. Such employees, however, do not allow negative affectivity to reduce their commitment to customer service as doing so may lead to penalties or dismissal.

Turning to the moderation results, employee positive affectivity was found to reduce the negative impact of complaints on commitment to customer service. Although there was no conclusive empirical precedent, these results were expected and are intuitively reasonable. High positive affectivity allows individuals to view customer criticism in a more positive light. They are more likely, for example, to adopt more proactive approaches for coping with the stress of customer complaints, such as negotiating with customers and increasing effort to resolve any conflict (Weatherly and Tansik 1993). At the very least, positive affective individuals are less likely to be discouraged by complaints.

A more surprising result is that higher levels of negative affectivity also reduce the negative impact of complaints on commitment to customer service. This result was unexpected and somewhat counterintuitive. Perhaps the most plausible explanation derives from attribution inconsistencies discussed earlier. It was argued that a possible reason behind service personnel reducing their commitment to customer service in response to customer complaints is that customer evaluations conflict with their own perceptions of the quality of service delivered. George (1992), however, explains that individuals high in negative affectivity generally have a negative orientation to the world around them and to themselves. Thus, negative feedback may only serve to reinforce what the individual already believes. This consistency between service personnel expectations and experience may lead to complaints having a neutral effect on their commitment to customer service. This argument receives support from various authors who argue that employees are more likely to accept feedback that is consistent with their self-image and self-evaluations (Fedor 1991; Ilgen, Fisher, and Taylor 1979). Kennedy and Willcutt (1964), for example, found that negative feedback generally had a debilitating effect on high performers but did not inhibit the performance of underachievers.