Do Recovery Efforts Have the Same Impact on Private and Public Complainants After Experiencing a Service Failure?

Abstract

This study investigated service failures in a public organization, focusing on whether types of complaints (i.e., complaining publicly or privately), the exposure generated by complaints, and reperformance (i.e., expeditiously satisfying citizens’ needs after the service failure) influenced perceptions of justice and complaint effectiveness. Several important findings emerged after conducting a preregistered online survey experiment with 665 respondents. First, when respondents were given vignettes detailing a well-executed reperformance after a private complaint, they did not post higher justice perceptions than those given vignettes detailing that a well-executed reperformance was conducted after a public complaint. Second, garnering high social media exposure from the complaint was only found to positively impact complaint effectiveness when individuals were given the public complaint vignette and primed with a reperformance that was not well-executed. Last, respondents who were provided with vignettes regarding public complaints were found to value the reperformance more than the exposure their complaint generated.

PLAIN LANGUAGE SUMMARY

• When respondents were given the vignettes detailing that a well-executed reperformance was conducted after a private complaint, they did not post higher justice perceptions than respondents given the vignettes detailing a well-executed reperformance was conducted after a public complaint.

• Garnering high social media exposure was found to positively impact complaint effectiveness when individuals were given the public complaint vignette and primed with a poorly executed reperformance.

• Respondents given vignettes regarding public complaints valued a well-executed reperformance more so than the publicity their results generated.

Keywords:

• Service failure
• service recovery
• justice perceptions
• effectiveness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data and models used in the analyses can be accessed at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/QNEBC6.

Notes

1 I examined several city government social media websites (i.e., Facebook and Twitter). City officials responded to favorable and unfavorable posts. In the case of favorable posts, the city official attempted to redress the service failure.

2 The removed hypothesis stated that public complainants with high levels of publicity will have higher justice perceptions than public complainants with low levels of publicity. It was removed because the justice items do not specifically relate to the level of publicity but rather to the reperformance, which is not assessed here. Consequently, this hypothesis was not tested.

3 Retweets were changed to repost on September 29, 2023 (https://www.techtimes.com/articles/296104/20230908/x-formerly-twitter-replaces-tweet-post-retweets-become-reposts-new.htm).