Politeness strategies in firms’ answers to customer complaints

Justice theory is an established framework for analysing the complaining behaviours of customers (Homburg and Fürst, 2005; del Rio-Lanza et al. 2008) and developing complaint-handling practices (Tax et al. 1998). A component of the interactional justice, (im)politeness plays an important role in the origin of complaints (Harrison-Walker, 2001; Bolkan, 2007; Cowan and Anthony, 2008). Despite a rich literature and numerous managerial recommendations, most research into justice theory has focused on the customer side (Davidow, 2003; Parasuraman, 2006; Homburg et al. 2010). Researchers have largely ignored politeness as a component of a complaints response. Research into complaint-handling is also primarily based on experiments initiated by the researchers using non-current or fictitious complaints. Research rarely mentions politeness as a dimension of interactional justice, either (see e.g. Strauss and Hill, 2001; Bolkan, 2007). Tax et al. (2008) proposed to analyze politeness as a component of interactional justice, for instance, but measured perceived politeness and did not consider concrete antecedents of politeness. Aside from Mattsson et al. (2004) and Dickinger and Bauernfeind (2009), no other research appears to analyse antecedents of politeness in written exchanges. Our research seeks to fill three main gaps: (1) a methodological gap by relying on naturally occurring data excluding possible researcher bias (Silverman, 2006); (2) a theoretical gap by proposing to marketing scholars new dimensions for measuring politeness objectively; and (3) an epistemological gap by answering Homburg and Fürst (2005, 2007) and Homburg et al. (2010) calls for a better understanding of firms’ practices and more managerial guidance.