IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/mgmchp/978-3-319-98705-7_9.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Complaint Reaction

In: Effective Complaint Management

Author

Listed:
  • Bernd Stauss

    (Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt)

  • Wolfgang Seidel

    (servmark consultancy)

Abstract

Complaint reaction encompasses all complaint management activities that the customer perceives during the complaint handling process. These activities include the direct contact with the complainants, the decision about the problem solution and the communication with the customer during the processing of the complaint. Regarding dealing with complainants, basic rules of conduct must be followed both for the direct conversation and for responding to written complaints. In direct conversations with complainants, five typical phases must be observed: the greeting phase, the aggression-reduction phase, the conflict-settlement phase, the problem-solution phase and the conclusive phase. When responding in writing to complaints, the following content-related aspects must be taken into account: initial wording, problem repetition, conflict settlement, problem solution and concluding wording. In addition, special groups of complainants and complaints deserve particular attention. These include repeat, multiple and follow-up complainants, grumblers and grousers as well as scattered complaints, complaints to top management, complaints about employees, and threats. Three basic groups of measures are available for the decision about the problem solution: financial, tangible and intangible. They have different consequences for the complainants’ satisfaction. Under certain conditions, the complainants’ demand can be fulfilled without an individual case examination. Most complaints are considered to be justified from the customers’ perspective; even if the complaints are objectively unjustified, it can make economic sense to react fairly. A differentiation of the complaint reaction according to customer value should only be considered with regard to the type of compensation, but not to the behavior in the customer contact situation. The communication during the complaint handling process is very important to the success of restoring customer satisfaction. Therefore, all forms of communication (confirmation of receipt, intermediate replies, final replies and follow-up contacts) must be carefully planned and the quality of the complaint correspondence and conversations must be reviewed systematically and regularly.

Suggested Citation

  • Bernd Stauss & Wolfgang Seidel, 2019. "Complaint Reaction," Management for Professionals, in: Effective Complaint Management, edition 2, chapter 9, pages 161-204, Springer.
  • Handle: RePEc:spr:mgmchp:978-3-319-98705-7_9
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-98705-7_9
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:mgmchp:978-3-319-98705-7_9. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.