A Study Of Consumer Complaint Behavior: The Cases In Travel Agencies

As to service-company, the repeated customer is company's important assets, and the most effective way to obtain repeat customer is to offer the product or the service according with or going beyond the customer's expectation in each service. However, each service company is unable to avoid serve failure no matter how excellent it is. Hart, Heskett and Sasser (1990) think the enterprises may be unable to totally avoid all the carelessness in the serving course. Boshoff (1997) also thinks that the fault is unable to be totally prevented in the service transmitting; in spite of a high-quality transmitting procedure, we cannot ensure the workers at the production line who are carrying out the procedure will not make a mistake. Because the tourism mainly provides the labor service of travel, the professional personnel of the travel offer their own professional knowledge to serve customer in good time, and its product is touchable, changeable, unstorable, and inalienable, under the situation of the customer's variety and the service's changeableness, the case of service failure takes place occasionally in the course of contact between the travel attendant and the customer; as a result, the consumer's complaint is unavoidable, and after the service failure the customer will usually have a passive attitude.This study focuses on the relation of service failure, service recovery, consumer satisfaction, and after-complaining behaviors, and the relation between consumer satisfaction and after-complaining behaviors. It discusses that whether service recovery can influence consumer's after-complaining behaviors by improving consumer satisfaction to reach the purpose of reducing consumers' complaint and travel dispute. Descriptive statistics, variance analysis, correlation analysis, and regression analysis were used in this study. The complaint about the tourism service failure is divided into kernel service complaint, service attitude complaint and special demand complaint; service recovery can be reflected by economic compensation, processing speeds, and service attitude; consumer satisfaction includes satisfaction to economic compensation, service attitude, processing speeds and the travel agency; consumer's after-complaining behaviors include the intent to repurchase and the word-of-mouth.The thesis is consisted of five chapters:Chapter 1 introduces the motive, purpose, target, and range of the study and the design of the research procedure.Chapter 2 reviews the domestic and international referrence correlated with this research, mainly about such concepts as serve failure, service recovery, satisfaction, and consumer intent of sequent behavior.Chapter 3 presents the research approach, including design of the scheme, supposition of the study, definition and measurement of the variable, design of thequestionnaire and analysis method of the materials. Chapter 4 is the analysis of the result.Chapter 5 concludes the study result and gives some suggestion for tourism. The results can be summarized as follows:1. Service recovery will influence consumer satisfaction and consumer intent of sequent behavior.2. Consumer satisfaction will influence consumer intent of sequent behavior.