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The purpose of this paper is to develop an integrated model to comprehensively understand the determinants of customers' intention to complain to firms and their effects on complaint intentions.

The research adopted a systematic sampling method and carried out surveys in department stores, large supermarkets, and convenience stores in China. The structural equation model was employed to test the hypotheses.

The results show that perceived value, perceived likelihood of successful complaint and the attitude toward complaining, all have significant effects on the complaint intention. Also, consumer discontent, prior experience of complaining and controllability are analyzed as the antecedents.

The results indicate that firms should encourage customers to complain by raising the complaining value and the likelihood of successful complaint, and by intensifying their attitude toward complaining.

The research findings extend the existing theoretical models and shed light on the complicated structural relationship among various factors that affect customers' tendency to complain directly with a more holistic viewpoint to better understand customers' complaint‐making behavior.

The area of customer complaint behaviour has received considerable attention from hotel managers as dissatisfied customers engage in a variety of complaint actions that could ruin the reputation of a hotel. This study examined Chinese customer complaint behaviour towards Hong Kong hotel restaurant services. The main objectives were to identify complaint patterns and the relationships between customers’ demographic backgrounds such as age, gender and education levels; and their complaint behaviours. Based on a survey of 220 hotel restaurant diners, complainers and non‐complainers were identified. The research findings suggested that at most customers are likely to engage in private complaint behaviours such as word‐of‐mouth communication and ceasing to patronize the restaurant. It highlights that the complaint intentions of Chinese diners were quite low and they were passive about communicating dissatisfaction to restaurateurs. Restaurateurs can make use of these findings to improve their existing customer feedback systems and complaint handling strategies.

“The customer service complaint is universal in physical distribution operations. It is inevitable that even the most efficient of distribution systems will occasionally have failures; it is equally inevitable that from these failures will emanate complaints. Only if an active and systematic effort is made to handle these complaints can they graduate … to become part of management's kit of tools in making its distribution system better and more responsive to the company's (and Its customers') needs.”

The seeds of many litigation and arbitration matters can be found in customer complaints that precede their filing. While few broker‐dealers would subscribe to the view that customer complaints are desirable, a customer complaint often provides the first opportunity to review and assess the facts that gave rise to such complaint. Effective use of this opportunity can lead to the early resolution of valid claims, which can result in a reduction in the number of arbitration and litigation matters and can reduce a firm’s overall expense and risk of defending arbitration and litigation claims. Customer complaints often arrive via correspondence written by the aggrieved customer. Such complaints should be taken seriously, investigated fully, and responded to promptly. Where such complaints are determined to have merit, broker‐dealers are well advised to make good‐faith efforts to resolve them promptly. Where complaints are determined not to have merit, well written and thorough explanations, which recite the relevant facts and clearly state the reason(s) for the firm’s conclusions, should be provided to the customers. Such explanations should be written with the expectation that one day they may become an exhibit in an arbitration or litigation proceeding.

More and more organizations find that a constructive and open dialogue with their customers can be an effective strategy for building long‐term customer relations. In this context, it has been recognized that effective complaint/contact handling can make a significant contribution to organizations’ attempts to maximize customer satisfaction and loyalty. Within the NHS, an intellectual awareness exists that effective complaint/contact handling can contribute to making services more efficient and cost‐effective by developing customer‐oriented improvement initiatives. Recent efforts have focused on redefining NHS complaint‐handling procedures to make them more user‐friendly and effective for both NHS employees and customers. Discusses the challenges associated with opening up the NHS to customer feedback. Highlights potential weaknesses in the current approach and argues that the real challenge is for NHS managers to facilitate a culture change that moves the NHS away from a long‐established defensive complaint‐handling practice.

The purpose of this paper is to test the differences in customer complaint behaviour between loyal customers and first comers.

This study has adopted the work of Ndubisi and Ling, which categorized consumer complaint actions into public, private, defection and no action. Interview and survey data were collected. SPSS 15.0 for Windows was used for data analysis. Descriptive statistics such as means, frequencies, Mann‐Whitney U test and chi‐square tests were calculated.

The results reveal that first comers are more willing to engage in private complaining actions such as negotiation and worth‐of‐mouth comments and telling friends and family about their bad experiences compared to loyal customers. Our major findings indicate that even if a first comer does not complain, this does not mean that the person is satisfied. As there is a likelihood that when a customer makes a private complaint, such as spreading negative word‐of‐mouth criticisms, bank managers should pay more attention to those customers. Further, first comers are more likely to take part in a defection by doing business with another firm following the bad experience compared to loyal customers.

It is a new study about the differences in customer complaint behaviour between loyal and first customers in Turkey. It presents valuable information that can assist bank managers and marketers understand the customer complaint behaviour of both loyal customers and first comers.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on complaint satisfaction with a particular emphasis on the qualities and behaviours that affect customers during personal complaint handling encounters.

Following a literature review of complaint satisfaction and the role of customer contact employees in complaint encounters, an exploratory study using both the laddering interviewing technique and Kano questionnaires is presented.

The laddering results indicate that being taken seriously in the complaint encounter and the employee's friendliness, listening skills and competence are particularly important. The fact that interpersonal factors are highly regarded indicates that customers want to satisfy these process needs first and their outcome expectations second. The Kano results show that employees' active listening skills are the only must‐be requirements while the two concepts “Apology” and “Respectful Treatment” are close to being must‐be criteria. In addition, the employee's feedback after the complaint handling encounter can almost be categorized as an excitement factor.

Owing to the exploratory nature of the study and the scope and size of the chosen sample, the results outlined are tentative in nature.

By combing two research methods, this paper develops an area of research that could reap considerable benefits for researchers interested in the area of customer complaint satisfaction.

This paper examines the regulatory requirements for the management of customer complaints in financial services. It describes the outcomes of new research, which show that most financial services companies are some way from being able to meet these new regulatory requirements. It identifies the processes that must be followed to fulfil these requirements and outlines the type of system that is likely to be able to support meeting these requirements. Finally, it identifies that the probable reason for the neglect of this area is the heavy involvement of most financial services companies’ customer service functions in meeting the needs of the sales process (before, during and after the sale) rather than the more traditional role of customer service ‐ listening to customers and solving their problems.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the interrelationship between process recovery, employee recovery and customer recovery in a financial services call centre. The authors also investigate how process recovery affects customer recovery via employees – the bridge between organisation and customers.

A case study–based approach is adopted in this study, and data triangulation is achieved through multiple data collection methods including semi-structured interviews, employees’ survey and company reports. Justice theory is the theoretical lens considered to understand the “service recovery (SR)” phenomenon.

This paper helps in understanding the relationship of process and employee recovery with customer recovery. Findings suggest that SR could be used for complaint management as well as in understanding and addressing the gaps in internal operations and employee skill sets. Factors such as training, operating systems, empowerment, incentives, and feedback were identified as critical in providing effective SR. Process improvement is necessary to control complaints by conducting root cause analysis and learning from failure.

Findings are limited to a case company in financial services sector and thus limit its generalisability to other context. Questionnaire distributed to employees only included important dimensions of SR, which would be further developed in future research.

This paper explores the specific reverse exchange strategies, termed in this paper as SR, and analyses the different factors responsible for better performance in the exchange process. The paper highlights how the imbalance in the process and employee recovery dimensions can impact on customer recovery. Closing the customer complaint loop by using the SR perspective may help organisation to not only deal with complaints in a better way but also prevent such complaints in the future.

Recently, the British Standards Institution (BSI) issued a new standard: BS 8600:1999 Complaints Management Systems – Guide to Design and Implementation. This standard tends to focus on those systems and procedures that organisations put into motion after a complaint has been received. However, for many customers, particularly of large organisations such as local government services, the problems begin with knowing how to gain access to the complaints system. In the public sector this visibility usually takes the form of some kind of information leaflet which should detail certain basic information that will allow customers to access the complaints system. This paper develops a framework for an effective customer complaints information leaflet and then evaluates Scottish councils’ corporate complaints information brochures against this framework to determine whether or not they meet its acceptance criteria for effectiveness. Each leaflet was evaluated against 12 points of good practice developed from both Central Government’s guidelines and the new British Standard guidelines. The results showed that although a majority of them met many of the framework criteria, a significant proportion fell well short of what would be deemed acceptable.