Abstract
Recently, Woodruff and Flint (2006) have backed Vargo and Lusch’s (2004) service-dominant (S-D) logic model stressing the role of value as a customer experiential phenomenon. According to the model, value is not embedded in products or services but always “value-in-use”, which means that customers experience value during interactions with service or product bundles in use situations. Companies, therefore, can only make value propositions as customers eventually decide what they regard as being of value to them. The following paper focuses on what complaining customers value in personal complaint handling service encounters. In particular, the aim of the paper is to investigate whether male and female complainants value the same or different aspects in these encounters. Complaint satisfaction can prevent customers from switching to other providers, reduce negative word-of-mouth communication and even generate positive communication about the company (Stauss 1999). Customer complaints are still most likely to be made in person to a contact employee (Brown 2000), and so such employees play a crucial role in creating complaint satisfaction. This study suggests that in such face-to-face situations, the perception of the complaint handling encounter and the overall evaluation of the company’s complaint resolution process will be largely influenced by the employee’s response. Direct contact employees may try to categorize their customers in order to better organize, interpret, and evaluate their interaction (Sharma and Levy 1995; Szymanski 1988). Such categorization can help contact employees to reduce complexity and to structure the customer complaint interaction more effectively. They could adjust the complaint handling process to customers’ expectations and needs based on their observable characteristics such as gender, which is a category that is frequently used to segment target groups and to explain consumer behavior. Although several research studies have already demonstrated that male and female customers have different preferences, information processing and decision-making styles (e.g. Iacobucci and Ostrom 1993), only a few (e.g. Keng et al. 1995) have investigated whether male and female customers differ in their complaining behavior.
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© 2015 Academy of Marketing Science
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Gruber, T., Szmigin, I., Voss, R., Reppel, A. (2015). Perceptions of Value in Complaint Handling Service Encounters. In: Robinson, Jr., L. (eds) Proceedings of the 2008 Academy of Marketing Science (AMS) Annual Conference. Developments in Marketing Science: Proceedings of the Academy of Marketing Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10963-3_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10963-3_7
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Online ISBN: 978-3-319-10963-3
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