<p>Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka hur tjänsteföretag med många kundkontakter samlar in synpunkter och klagomål från deras kunder. Genom att undersöka hur företag motiverar sin kontaktpersonal att ta emot synpunkter, vill vi förstå i vilken utsträckning empowerment används som motivationsteori. Studien utgår från ett ledningsperspektiv och använder ett kontaktpersonalperspektiv för att se om ledningen och kontaktpersonalens världsbild överensstämmer.</p><p>Metoden har varit fyra kvalitativa fallstudier med kundserviceansvariga och kvantitativa enkäter till kontaktpersonalen i respektive företag.</p><p>Slutsatserna är att vi har funnit att företagen delvis motiverar sin personal utifrån empowerment och de specifika fallföretagen kan utveckla sin synpunktshantering i syfte att anpassa sig efter kundernas krav.</p>

Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka hur tjänsteföretag med många kundkontakter samlar in synpunkter och klagomål från deras kunder. Genom att undersöka hur företag motiverar sin kontaktpersonal att ta emot synpunkter, vill vi förstå i vilken utsträckning empowerment används som motivationsteori. Studien utgår från ett ledningsperspektiv och använder ett kontaktpersonalperspektiv för att se om ledningen och kontaktpersonalens världsbild överensstämmer. Metoden har varit fyra kvalitativa fallstudier med kundserviceansvariga och kvantitativa enkäter till kontaktpersonalen i respektive företag. Slutsatserna är att vi har funnit att företagen delvis motiverar sin personal utifrån empowerment och de specifika fallföretagen kan utveckla sin synpunktshantering i syfte att anpassa sig efter kundernas krav.

Abstract Author : Alain Patrick Ngae a Njama Tutor : Peter Caesar Examiner : Pejvak Oghazi Title : After sales service: Complaint to Service Recovery Improvement Keywords : Service Recovery, Complaint handling, service failure, service process, Svetruck AB Background : It is real that everyday people purchase goods for their daily needs and satisfaction, but unfortunately it happen that some of those goods do not live up to the customer expectations. The reality when a failure occurred is something else because is the second chance giving to the service provider to show concern. Many research agreed that good recovery after a service failure can create a positive response from the customer side as example making them loyal and sharing their positive experience to others. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to look into how service recovery influence customer retention. Research question: How Does Company handles customer’s complaint in order to fulfill service recovery ? Method: Three respondents were selected within a heavy industry call Svetruck AB. Due to their position and number of year they have been working for this company. Many section of interview were organized in order to have a clear understanding of the inside out of the service handling process. Conclusion: Complaint handling appears to be very essential for each company willing to stay in the competitive word. Some will differ from the way they handle or treat their customer but the final issue for all companies will be to keep satisfies their customer for long-term relationship, also by reducing the cost of hunting new customers. Suggestion for further research : After the investigation of complaint handling from the service 3 provider side, we can think of other areas to investigate related to this topic. One of it will be to make an investigation on complaint handling from the customer point of view to find out how the customer perceived satisfaction after the service provider have handled their complaint. Another point may be to compare Svetruck complaint handling with the one of one of their mean competitor to see the point that differ them from the others. Further investigations can also be made on unsatisfied customers, those who have experience bad service recovery by then had chosen to switch to competitor.

This thesis investigates the impact of customer¡¦s voice and service requests to customer satisfactions and royalty in competitive service industry. The objective of the problem is to identify the customer¡¦s communication channel and enquiries are the main key factors of customer complaint response by data mining method and cross-factors analysis. We proposed to build the internal platform to collect and analyze the long term consumer¡¦s requirements to set the marketing policy and the service mechanism to meet quick response and increase customer service level.

This study aimed to investigate Chinese EFL interlanguage complaint behaviors in terms of production collected by role play and DCT. Four contextual factors were involved: social distance, social status, gender and obligation. A total of 320 role plays were elicited from 80 college students, including 20 native speakers of English, 20 native speakers of Chinese, 20 EFL-low proficiency learners and 20 EFL-high proficiency learners. Additionally, the DCT data were elicited by 180 participants, including 60 native speakers of Chinese, 60 native speakers of English, 30 EFL-high proficiency learners and 30 EFL-low proficiency learners. Three aspects of complaints were examined: complaint strategies, complaint modifications and the effect of language proficiency. Results showed that no matter in role play or on DCT, participants tended to use more indirect strategies to avoid conflicts with others. Below the level of Reproach was the main complaint strategy they used. Besides, the complaint strategies used by the four groups were quite similar in role play. However, they differed in the frequency of strategy use, the preference orders, and modifications used in making their complaints. On the other hand, participants performed quite differently on DCT. They differed in strategy use, but there were no significant difference in frequency use, preference orders, and the use of modifications. Furthermore, NS-E tended to use more direct strategies than EFL learners. This result echoed Olshtain and Weinbach¡¦s (1993) findings that learners would use less severe strategies than native speakers because learners would try to ¡§¡Kavoid straightforward face-threatening interactions at all costs¡¨ (p. 115). Besides, proficiency effect is found in EFL learners¡¦ interlanguage complaints production. It is more difficult for EFL-L learners to make complaints because of their low L2 proficiency. For future studies, gathering natural occurring data to compare the differences between role play is suggested. Besides, due to time limitation, the issue of interlocutor gender differences is not discussed and future work could include this matter to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the speech at of complaints.

Organisations are facing increasing pressures in terms of customer service since customers tend to become more demanding as competition within industries increases. In order to succeed in this changing marketplace, organisations should focus on forming and maintaining long-term relationships with their customers. Developing long-term relationships, in turn, depends on the organisation?s ability to exceed customers? expectations and to continuously ensure customer satisfaction. Service organisations in particular find it difficult to provide constant customer satisfaction due to the high level of human involvement in service delivery, which often leads to inevitable service failures. Service failures, as a result, cause the disconfirmation of service expectations. This disconfirmation gives rise to customer dissatisfaction, which is generally considered as the initiator of customer complaint behaviour. Culture is regarded as one of the most influential factors affecting customers? behaviour in response to dissatisfaction with a purchase experience. Customers? culture could have an impact on the manner in which customers engage in complaint behaviour, and could also have a bearing on how service failures and organisations? service recovery efforts are perceived. Organisations functioning in a multicultural country such as South Africa could therefore benefit from gaining a more profound understanding of cultural influences on customer behaviour and specifically complaint behaviour. The primary objective of this study was to determine the influence of culture on customers? complaint behaviour pertaining to service failures within the context of the South African banking industry. A structured, interviewer-administered questionnaire was used to collect data from banking customers residing in Gauteng, who were sampled by means of a non-probability sampling method. In total, 600 respondents participated in this study, comprising 150 each from the black, coloured, Indian/Asian and white cultural groups. Results from the study indicate that although the majority of respondents have a propensity to complain, no practically significant differences were found between respondents from different cultures with regard to their propensity to complain. Results furthermore showed no differences between the different cultural groups in terms of their complaint behaviour following a hypothetical service failure. Although it was established that respondents expect the bank to do something about the service failure ? in particular correcting the problem and providing an explanation for the problem ? respondents? expectations regarding service recovery and perceptions of the bank?s service recovery efforts were found not to have been influenced by their respective cultures. The results, in addition, showed that a higher service recovery effort had a more positive effect on respondents? post-recovery satisfaction, likelihood of maintaining their relationship with the bank and loyalty, than that of a lower service recovery effort. It is recommended that banks should not view their customers differently in terms of their cultural backgrounds, but that they should rather focus continuously on providing all customers with the same level of quality service, even after a service failure has occurred. Banks should also encourage all customers to voice complaints directly to them in order to minimise the harmful effects of negative word-of-mouth and to improve recoveries from failures. Since respondents in this study indicated that they expect banks to offer an apology in the case of a service failure, to provide an explanation of the cause of the problem and to correct the problem, banks should ensure that a high level of quality interaction takes place between the dissatisfied customer and employees following a service failure. Such an approach requires banks to ensure that their employees are motivated and competent to solve customers? problems. It is therefore also recommended that banks should invest resources in employee selection, training, development, empowerment, discretionary decision-making power and support in order to ensure that customer-facing employees are able to provide a satisfactory service recovery, and are able to efficiently manage the complaint process. Recommendations for future research include extending this study to other service settings in order to determine whether there are similarities or differences in the influence of culture on customers? complaint behaviour pertaining to service failures. Future research can be conducted in collaboration with a specific bank in order to discover more specific information with regards to service failures and complaint situations within the bank, as well as customers? perceptions of the bank?s existing service recovery systems. Finally, since no differences between cultural groups were found, this study can be replicated in order to compare South African customers with those in other countries in order to determine differences in national cultures. / Thesis (M.Com (Marketing Management))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2011.

Organisations are facing increasing pressures in terms of customer service since customers tend to become more demanding as competition within industries increases. In order to succeed in this changing marketplace, organisations should focus on forming and maintaining long-term relationships with their customers. Developing long-term relationships, in turn, depends on the organisation?s ability to exceed customers? expectations and to continuously ensure customer satisfaction. Service organisations in particular find it difficult to provide constant customer satisfaction due to the high level of human involvement in service delivery, which often leads to inevitable service failures. Service failures, as a result, cause the disconfirmation of service expectations. This disconfirmation gives rise to customer dissatisfaction, which is generally considered as the initiator of customer complaint behaviour. Culture is regarded as one of the most influential factors affecting customers? behaviour in response to dissatisfaction with a purchase experience. Customers? culture could have an impact on the manner in which customers engage in complaint behaviour, and could also have a bearing on how service failures and organisations? service recovery efforts are perceived. Organisations functioning in a multicultural country such as South Africa could therefore benefit from gaining a more profound understanding of cultural influences on customer behaviour and specifically complaint behaviour. The primary objective of this study was to determine the influence of culture on customers? complaint behaviour pertaining to service failures within the context of the South African banking industry. A structured, interviewer-administered questionnaire was used to collect data from banking customers residing in Gauteng, who were sampled by means of a non-probability sampling method. In total, 600 respondents participated in this study, comprising 150 each from the black, coloured, Indian/Asian and white cultural groups. Results from the study indicate that although the majority of respondents have a propensity to complain, no practically significant differences were found between respondents from different cultures with regard to their propensity to complain. Results furthermore showed no differences between the different cultural groups in terms of their complaint behaviour following a hypothetical service failure. Although it was established that respondents expect the bank to do something about the service failure ? in particular correcting the problem and providing an explanation for the problem ? respondents? expectations regarding service recovery and perceptions of the bank?s service recovery efforts were found not to have been influenced by their respective cultures. The results, in addition, showed that a higher service recovery effort had a more positive effect on respondents? post-recovery satisfaction, likelihood of maintaining their relationship with the bank and loyalty, than that of a lower service recovery effort. It is recommended that banks should not view their customers differently in terms of their cultural backgrounds, but that they should rather focus continuously on providing all customers with the same level of quality service, even after a service failure has occurred. Banks should also encourage all customers to voice complaints directly to them in order to minimise the harmful effects of negative word-of-mouth and to improve recoveries from failures. Since respondents in this study indicated that they expect banks to offer an apology in the case of a service failure, to provide an explanation of the cause of the problem and to correct the problem, banks should ensure that a high level of quality interaction takes place between the dissatisfied customer and employees following a service failure. Such an approach requires banks to ensure that their employees are motivated and competent to solve customers? problems. It is therefore also recommended that banks should invest resources in employee selection, training, development, empowerment, discretionary decision-making power and support in order to ensure that customer-facing employees are able to provide a satisfactory service recovery, and are able to efficiently manage the complaint process. Recommendations for future research include extending this study to other service settings in order to determine whether there are similarities or differences in the influence of culture on customers? complaint behaviour pertaining to service failures. Future research can be conducted in collaboration with a specific bank in order to discover more specific information with regards to service failures and complaint situations within the bank, as well as customers? perceptions of the bank?s existing service recovery systems. Finally, since no differences between cultural groups were found, this study can be replicated in order to compare South African customers with those in other countries in order to determine differences in national cultures. / Thesis (M.Com (Marketing Management))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2011.

Thesis (S.T.D.)--Concordia Seminary, 1994. / Includes Hebrew text of each Psalm with translation. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 212-229).

Even though penalty policies have been adopted as airlines marketing strategies, little academic literature is found. Popular industries which were investigated for penalty policies include cell phone, credit card, hotel, airlines, bank, college, retail store, restaurant, and day care service companies. Notwithstanding the penalty policies commonly adopted in the airline industry, literature for airlines penalty policies is difficult to find and no literature exists to examine the impact of penalties based upon actual data from airlines. This study is the first research to investigate the impact of the penalty policy of airlines concerning the re-purchase behaviour of penalized customers by the actual data collected in the airline company. In this study, a total of 200 cases of data were collected from the airport authority and an international airline company in South Korea. The collected data were reviewed and categorized by demographic factors of customers including gender, and age; by the relationship with the airlines such as customer membership status of the airline loyalty programme; and by the results of the penalty resolution process such as whether the penalty was waived, the reasons for complaints concerning penalty charges, and the results of customers’ repurchase behaviour. To identify the reasons for customer complaints concerning imposing a penalty, all cases of complaints were reviewed and categorized. Attributes of the penalty and concept of perceived justice theory composed of distributive, procedural, and interactional justice were used to understand which factors play a key influential role in customer re-purchase behaviour. According to coding the table, the categorized data were coded and tested by parametric analysis (logistic regression model) in SPSS 20 program and ANOVA. As a result of the research, the customers’ loyalty programme membership status has been shown to positively influenced the re-purchase behaviour. The factors concerning penalty amount and severity (related to distribution justice) negatively affect customer re-purchase behaviour. The other factors are indicated as not significant to customer re-purchase behaviour. This study suggests that the valuable idea from the impact of penalty for the re-purchase behaviour should be considered by airline executives who should build more effective penalty policies. Especially, imposing a penalty amount is considered as one of the most significant factors affecting the perception of fairness and customer intention to raise complaints. In addition to the penalty amount, the airline loyalty programme membership status has to be considered as a key factor to maintain customer loyalty where penalties have been imposed.

Following the call for further research on the organisational side of complaint handling, this research aims to explore actual firms’ complaint handling practices with a special focus on the role of politeness in firms-complaints interactions. This research is largely based on a dataset of naturally occurring exchanges obtained from the online public forum Les Arnaques – “The Scams” (www.lesarnaques.com). The setting is similar to a double-deviation scenario: the consumers had already complained once through the relevant company but were unsatisfied with the response. By lodging their complaint on the forum they seek mediation to obtain satisfaction in a second attempt.As a first step, an enhanced conceptualisation of politeness in relation to the concept of complaint handling was proposed and tested. Sociolinguistics theories were used (Goffman’s theory of face, Grice’s maxims) and a quantitative analysis was conducted, to discover how the consumer’s perception of a firm’s politeness is influenced. This conceptualisation, new for the marketing literature, led to proposing a more accurate framework to assess the politeness-related practices of firms when handling complaints.In a second step, this new conceptualisation of politeness was integrated within a larger framework to assess firms’ practices on several dimensions. Justice theory was used as a starting point to define practices within each dimension of justice: distributive, procedural and interactional. Literature from other disciplines (sociology, linguistics, psychology) was used to define precisely the different constructs belonging to the three dimensions. For instance the “empathy” construct was split, based on the literature in psychology, into cognitive and affective empathy, which allowed the precise identification of the occurrences of empathy in firms’ answers. The effects of 33 dimensions were analysed, using a sample of 523 exchanges archived from the forum Les Arnaques. A multinomial regression analysis showed that the most significant antecedent of post-complaint satisfaction was a new dimension, not previously found in the literature: the provision of evidence that the complainant’s problem had been, or was about to be, solved.In a third step, exploratory research was undertaken to investigate possible collinearity effects between three of the most often cited constructs of interactional justice: empathy, politeness and apology. Using the coding guide previously developed, and the exchanges coded, results showed some overlap between the constructs and high Cramer’s V, indicating a redundant concept. Recommendations were provided as to what should be measured, and how, so that researchers can avoid such effects in the future.The naturally occurring exchanges used for the first three steps revealed that firms’ answers were often impolite and littered with spelling mistakes. Two subsequent papers explored the phenomena of grammaticality and im/politeness.In a fourth step, the effects of grammaticality and politeness on customers’ perceptions and behavioural outcomes were explored. Specifically, a survey was conducted to determine the effect of grammar/spelling mistakes and politeness on the perception of professionalism and on repurchase intention. Results from a PATH analysis showed that politeness and grammaticality had low or no direct effect on loyalty. However, indirect effects mediated by professionalism were strong, indicating that consumers’ repurchase intentions depend on a firm’s perceived professionalism.Finally, in a fifth step, efforts were focused on impoliteness and on the role the communication channel plays in expressions of impoliteness. Impolite answers found on the online forum were compared with offline responses obtained in a field experiment. Unexpectedly, results from a discourse analysis showed that the highest levels of impoliteness were not reached in online exchanges, where users can hide behind anonymity, but in postal exchanges. In particular, we found that some companies returned the original complaint letter, riddled with insults. This led us to propose that impoliteness not only a matter of content (the words being used) but also of form. In this case, the letter seemed to act as a catalyst for conflict and was the trigger for verbal violence.In terms of marketing, the following work contributes to theory building by proposing a new conceptualisation of politeness, by defining a more precise framework to analyse firms’ complaint handling practices, and by uncovering collinearity effects that may have impeded previous results. The last two steps of this thesis bring exploratory insights by showing the effects of politeness and grammaticality on consumers’ perceptions.Besides contributing new academic insights, one goal of this thesis was also to serve the business community. The findings show that politeness matters: not only does politeness help reach short-term goals like post-complaint satisfaction, but it also contributes to long-term effort, like forging a professional identity and fostering customer loyalty. / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished