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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NWUBOLOKA1/oai:dspace.nwu.ac.za:10394/4416 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Walters, Mariëtte Louise |
| Publisher | North-West University |
| Source Sets | North-West University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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