APPENDIX D
COMPLAINT HANDLING: WHERE DOES THE LATEST RESEARCH TAKE US?

The last twenty years have seen a dramatic increase in the number of articles written about customer complaints. Many are solid, research-based articles; others offer mostly advice about this difficult subject. When A Complaint Is a Gift was published in 1996, Barlow and Møller plotted the sheer number of articles published on complaint handling. Since then, Barlow and Maul have gone back to see what additional articles have been written since 1995, once again using the Dialog database as a basic source. Here’s what we found.

Clearly, the interest in this topic has not waned, though the increase in articles on complaint handling does seem to be leveling off. Recent articles range in topics from the simple and direct, “How to Handle Customer Complaints,” to the complex and research based, “Why Don’t Some People Complain? A Cognitive-Emotive Process Model of Consumer Complaint Behavior.”¹ Within this growing body of printed research and advice, however, there is little discussion of the verbal interaction between service representatives and complaining customers. Since this is precisely where the highest component of emotionality resides, there clearly is room for more research in this area.260

Most of the complaint research of the last decade has focused on written complaints. The research is, by and large, solidly designed. After all, research based on written documents is a lot easier to conduct than research based on a live interactive process between customers and company representatives. However, studying written complaints is limiting since most formal complaints since the early 1990s are expressed live on toll-free lines.²

Furthermore, almost all the research that has been conducted in the last thirty years has been an analysis of how organizations respond to complaints, rather than how they emotionally interact with customers when they are in this critical customer service moment. All this has led Marquette University and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee researchers Dennis Garrett and Renee Meyers to conclude: “In sum, even though dissatisfied consumers are encouraged to complain directly to company service representatives via telephone, relatively little is known about the nature of these important verbal interactions.”³

Garrett and Meyers’s research on live interactions stands as an exception to the trend of analyzing written complaints or customer-remembered complaint situations. After audiotaping, dividing each call into conversational units, and then analyzing 461 live interactions between complaining customers and company representatives, Garrett and Meyers have reached some important conclusions.⁴

Both parties, consumers and company representatives, perform distinct communication roles in complaint telephone calls. Company representatives basically obtain information, identify the problem, attempt to understand its causes, and then resolve the customer problem. Customers, on the other hand, primarily explain their problem and attempt to seek resolution. This conclusion is pretty much as one would expect. The topics not discussed, however, are perhaps the significant concerns for customers.261

Garrett and Meyers found that customer expectations were almost never discussed—only in 0.5 percent of the conversational units, the segments into which the researchers broke the conversations. When expectations were discussed, customers brought up the subject 85.4 percent of the time. We have defined emotions as being about things that matter. If this is the case, then to be emotionally sensitive, eliciting and then discussing customer expectations would seem to be in order. And this is not happening—at least according to this research.

Garrett and Meyers also found that customers were most likely to discuss how well the company performed (83 percent of the time), while the organization stayed away from performance topics (17 percent of the time). Because company performance directly impacts customers, organizations can show empathy to customers by initiating conversation on this topic. Instead, Garrett and Meyers found that company representatives dominated the discussion when attempting to determine where the blame lay and what was a fair solution.⁵ As Garrett and Meyers say, both “have a stake in the final resolution,” but mostly the representatives describe what they will do, and in most cases, “consumers passively accept(ed) the proposed solution without debate or counter proposal.”⁶

There appears to be little standardization in terms of how individual representatives communicate with their customers. This is an interesting point because several researchers have argued that in order to measure the efficacy of complaint handling, standardization is necessary.⁷ Garrett and Meyers conclude that standardization may, in fact, be difficult and perhaps not even desirable. The representatives they studied had undergone identical training procedures but they did not respond to customers the same way. They conclude, “In fact, this individualized communication approach may be beneficial if it yields greater customer satisfaction with the resolution of complaints.”⁸