Service providers must understand that they have to provide customer-perceived value, if they want to stay in business. One of the best ways to determine customer-perceived value is to encourage customer complaint. This will make it easier to identify areas of the service process which the consumer believes must be improved. The ultimate goal of our thesis is to identify and establish the patterns of customer complaint behaviour in public transportation which is a part of the service sector. If patterns are identified, it will be much easier to encourage and predict customers‘ abilities and willingness to complain during a service process. Hence, service providers will be able to create an environment that can encourage and facilitate customer complaint processes. In this regard, service providers will obtain more information that will enable them to improve the quality of their services in order provide customer-perceived value. In addition, due to the fact that services are offered at the same time when the customer is there, this increases chances of customers seeing failures. Therefore, it is vital to make it easier for customers to be able to complain as soon as they perceive these failures so that they leave the service environment satisfied. Thus, understanding the pattern of customer complaint behaviour will make this process easier. By pattern, we mean sequence and therefore, there must be factors that influence this sequence. Our thesis shall focus on three main factors; cost, contextual resources and customer‘s competence, that influence the ability, willingness and the extent to which customers will engage in a complain process. Therefore, this thesis focuses on the following: What is the pattern of customer complaint behaviour in public transportation and how do cost, contextual resources and customer‘s competence impact this pattern?However, we shall also mention other external factors that may influence the pattern of customer complaint behaviour like market structure and service characteristics. It is imperative to understand customer complaint behaviour in service because through customer complaint, customers‘ quality expectations can be determined and met. Studies reveal that, although complaint channels may exist, some customers still do not complaint. In our survey, only 21.6% of respondents who encountered a service failure actually complained implying that 78.4% of the respondents who encountered an unfavourable service experience did not complain. What could be the reasons that customers who encounter problems do not complaint, although they would want to complain?2Above all, if there is something to be learnt from customer complaint behaviour, we think that it should be the patterns of customer complaint behaviour. This is because if patterns can be identified, then the right channels can be put in place by service providers in order to encourage and facilitate the complaint process. This will enable much information to be obtained from the customers and then used to make improvements in the service offerings and processes. In this regard service quality and customer satisfaction can be increased. This will lead to customer retention and higher profits for the company as well as prevent negative word-of-mouth.In this thesis, we identified patterns of customer complaint behaviour in service with a focus in public transportation by using data from the passengers of the public bus companies of Karlstad city and the intercity bus company (SWEBUS) as bases of our research. In our questionnaire we asked customers to indicate the strength of preference for a complaint channel they would use in order to make a complaint to the bus company in the event of a negative service experience. The results were ranked in order to determine the pattern of customer complaint behaviour in public transportation. We approached this topic by revealing the importance of understanding customer complaint behaviour and using this knowledge to improve service development. We proceeded by emphasising on the importance of viewing customer complaint behaviour from the perspective of service dominant logic. / The Service and Market Oriented Transport Research Group

It is vital for every service provider to get feedback from its customers. This is especially important when a customer has perceived an unfavourable service experience. One way to receive feedback from these customers is to encourage and make it easy for them to complain. Scholarly knowledge about complaint behaviour gives the service provider valuable insight about service problems and how to improve e.g. service offerings, service processes and interactions, to increase customer satisfaction, loyalty and profit. For that reason it is argued that customers who have an unfavourable service experience should be encouraged to complain, because if not, the provider risks losing the customer and thus future revenue. Previous research within complaint behaviour has mainly focused on the static description of motivation, antecedents, or the outcome response of complaint behaviour. The research has mainly explored different features linked to the market, the provider, the service and/or individual customer’s issues. To learn more about the customer’s complaint behaviour there is a need to take a dynamic and processual approach. This may help providers to serve customers more correctly and prevent unfavourable service experiences. The main aim of this dissertation is to enhance the knowledge of the dynamic behavioural processes in customer complaint behaviour. The dissertation will contribute to conceptualise different aspects of customer complaint behaviour. In addition, the dissertation will give an empirical grounded understanding of contextual and emotional aspects that may help to recognize the complexity of the complaint behaviour process. The contribution is a portrayal of different models describing the dynamic process of complaint behaviour including a new customer complaint behaviour model. Customer complaint behaviour is viewed as action and reaction - as a dynamic adjustment process that occurs during and/or after the service interaction, rather as a post-purchase activity. In order to capture these adjustments, a new conceptual complaint model is suggested which holds three thresholds for complaint behaviour and emphasis three different behavioural categories in the complaint process. Further, the dissertation gives an explanation of contextual and emotional issues that influence the complaint behaviour. The dissertation also includes an epistemological framework to anchor the paradigmatic belongings of service research as a basis for the design of studies in the area of customer complaint behaviour.

<p>It is vital for every service provider to get feedback from its customers.</p><p>This is especially important when a customer has perceived an unfavourable service experience. One way to receive feedback from these customers is to encourage and make it easy for them to complain.</p><p>Scholarly knowledge about complaint behaviour gives the service provider valuable insight about service problems and how to improve e.g. service offerings, service processes and interactions, to increase customer satisfaction, loyalty and profit. For that reason it is argued that customers who have an unfavourable service experience should be encouraged to complain, because if not, the provider risks losing the customer and thus future revenue.</p><p>Previous research within complaint behaviour has mainly focused on the static description of motivation, antecedents, or the outcome response of complaint behaviour. The research has mainly explored different features linked to the market, the provider, the service and/or individual customer’s issues. To learn more about the customer’s complaint behaviour there is a need to take a dynamic and processual approach. This may help providers to serve customers more correctly and prevent unfavourable service experiences.</p><p>The main aim of this dissertation is to enhance the knowledge of the dynamic behavioural processes in customer complaint behaviour. The dissertation will contribute to conceptualise different aspects of customer complaint behaviour. In addition, the dissertation will give an empirical grounded understanding of contextual and emotional aspects that may help to recognize the complexity of the complaint behaviour process.</p><p>The contribution is a portrayal of different models describing the dynamic process of complaint behaviour including a new customer complaint behaviour model. Customer complaint behaviour is viewed as action and reaction - as a dynamic adjustment process that occurs during and/or after the service interaction, rather as a post-purchase activity. In order to capture these adjustments, a new conceptual complaint model is suggested which holds three thresholds for complaint behaviour and emphasis three different behavioural categories in the complaint process. Further, the dissertation gives an explanation of contextual and emotional issues that influence the complaint behaviour. The dissertation also includes an epistemological framework to anchor the paradigmatic belongings of service research as a basis for the design of studies in the area of customer complaint behaviour.</p>

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.

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.

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.

Mobiltelefonen som ett objekt har en stor betydelse för ungdomarna i dagens samhälle. Unga människor uppfattar sin mobiltelefon som en förlängning av sig själva och kan inte uthärda tanken på att vara borta från den. Men i olika situationer som tillexempel ett reklamationstillfälle, har den unga konsumenten inget annat val än att lämna in sin mobiltelefon för reparation. Reklamation är något som är oundvikligt och kan ses som ett misslyckande i sig, men det är hanteringen av reklamationen som avgör om den anses vara lyckad eller misslyckad för kunden.Denna studie syftade till att undersöka relationen mellan den unga konsumenten och deras mobiltelefon och hur detta förhållande kan påverka varför de uppfattar en reklamation som misslyckad. Genom sju intervjuer har vi bett våra respondenter att prata om deras specifika reklamationstillfälle och hur de använder sin mobiltelefon i vardagen.Resultaten visade att de främsta anledningarna till att våra respondenter funnit sin hantering av reklamationen som ett misslyckande berodde på faktorer såsom väntetid, merkostnader, dålig ersättningsprodukt och ovänliga personal. Det visade också att våra respondenter har en anknytning till sin mobiltelefon och på grund av detta förhållande kan ovannämnda faktorer komma att ändras beroende på hur fästa en individ är till hans eller hennes produkt. / The mobile phone as an object has a great meaning for the youth in today's society. Young people perceive their mobile phone as an extension of themselves and cannot bear the thought of being apart from it. However, in different situations such as a customer complaint handling, the young customer has no other option but to hand it in for reparation. The customer complaints is something that is unavoidable and can be seen as a failure in itself but it is the handling of the customer complaint that decide if a customer complaint has been successful or not.This study aimed to investigate the relationship between the young consumer and their mobile phone and how this relationship might affect why they perceive a customer complaint handling as failed. Trough seven conducted interviews we asked our respondents to talk about their specific customer complaint situation and how they use their mobile phone.The results showed that the main reasons why our respondents found their complaint handling as failed depended on factors such as, waiting time, additional costs, poor substitute product and unfriendly personnel. It also showed that our respondents have an attachment to their mobile phone and because of this relationship the aforementioned factors might change dependent on how attached an individual is to his or her product.

The aim of this diploma work is to analyse and evaluate claims in Renault Česká republika, Inc. by using the recommendations of quality management and by means of Pareto analysis as a quality control tool, and also to propose measures for reduction of causes of their emergence. In this work I review claims in Renault Česká republika, Inc. submitted in the years 2006, 2007 and first half of 2008. As a result and consequence of the analysis I propose solutions, which could help in making an effort to increase the satisfaction of both regular and prospective customers.

Railway is one of public transport mode on land transportation. Railways, as mass public transport modes, have unique characteristics. It has large capacity, high safety level, and free from traffic jam. Those characteristics make railway a primary public transportation. In  fact, even railway transportation has a lot of benefits for society life but they still faced by the problem. Service quality level of Railways transportation is still low compared with other transportation modes. At present railways operation is still colored with the delay, limited condition vehicle, and unclear train travel information that often disadvantage passengers, and many other services offered fail to attract passengers. These conditions result in decreasing the quality of services and insufficient railways operation. The objective of this research is to analyze the relationship between customer satisfaction towards provided service with the desire to do a complaint and to find the factor from service quality that has significant influences to customer satisfaction towards PT KAI services. From that data, and also comparison study between PT Kereta Api Indonesia and Statens Järnvägar (SJ) AB, Sweden, we can recommend the service standards design, service guarantee and complaint handling system that need to be adjusted with the interest of consumer. The data was collected via field survey in the station that located in Jakarta, Yogyakarta and Pekalongan. This research shows several findings. First, there are six factors of service quality attributes that have significant influences to customer satisfaction towards PT KAI services for commuter class (Information, Appearances, Service coverage, Tangible, Safety &amp; security, and Cost), seven factors for business class (Travel time, Information, Scheduling, Comfort, Tangible, Safety &amp; security, and Service coverage), and also seven factor for executive class (Appearances, Safety &amp; security, Information, Comfort, Tangible, Travel time, and Cost). Second, while the commuter class passengers complain on the Safety &amp; security attribute, for business class it is the information that influence the desire to complain. Meanwhile for executive class, passengers are mostly satisfied with the service given by PT KAI. Third, to decrease the number of complaints, some effective mechanisms to handle those complaints and learning from Statens Järnvägar (SJ) AB are necessary to take. Fourth, the service standards for PT KAI can be classified into 6 details of service, (safety and security attributes; comfort and appearances attributes; availability of information aspect attributes; tangible attributes; service coverage attributes; and the operations of train). For service guarantee design, this research focus on travel time guarantee. Learning from Statens Järnvägar (SJ) AB on Sweden service guarantee, PT KAI can adopt and use their system to increase customer satisfaction.