Purpose: This paper aims to demonstrate that online complainants' reactions to a company's service recovery attempts (webcare) can significantly
vary across two different types of dissatisfied customers ("vindictives" vs "constructives"), who have dramatically diverging complaint Goal
orientations.
Design/methodology/Approach: Online multi-country survey among 812 adult consumers who recently had a dissatisfying brand experience and
turned to a marketer-generated social media site to voice an online complaint for achieving their ultimate complaining goals. Scenario-based online
experiment for cross-validating the survey findings.
Findings: Results suggest that "vindictive complainants" - driven dominantly by brand-adverse motives - are immune to any form of webcare,
while "constructive complainants" - interested in restoring the customer-brand relationship - react more sensitively. For the latter, "no-responses"
often trigger detrimental brand-related reactions (e.g. unfavorable brand image), whereas "defensive Responses" are likely to stimulate postwebcare
negative word-of-mouth.
Research limitations/implications: This research identifies the gains and harms of (un-)desired webcare. By doing so, it not only sheds light on
the circumstances when marketers have to fear negative effects (e.g. negative word-of-mouth) but also provides insights into the conditions when
such effects are unlikely. While the findings of the cross-sectional survey are validated with an online experiment, findings should be interpreted
with care as other complaining contexts should be further investigated.
Practical implications: Marketers have to expect a serious "backfiring effect" from an unexpected source, namely, consumers who were initially
benevolent toward the involved brand but who received an inappropriate response.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VIENNA/oai:epub.wu-wien.ac.at:6873 |
| Date | January 2019 |
| Creators | Weitzl, Wolfgang |
| Publisher | Emerald Publishing Limited |
| Source Sets | Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article, PeerReviewed |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) |
| Relation | http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/JPBM-04-2018-1843, http://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/, http://epub.wu.ac.at/6873/ |
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