Consumer reaction to service failure and recovery: the moderating role of attitude toward complaining

Purpose – The paper seeks to investigate, in a context of service failure and recovery, how consumer satisfaction is affected by problem severity and company responsiveness, how satisfaction influences repatronage intentions, word‐of‐mouth, and complaint intentions, and how consumer attitude toward complaining (ATC) moderates these relationships. Design/methodology/approach – An integrated model is proposed, following recent developments in the service recovery literature. This model is tested using data from a survey with 204 complaining customers. Findings – Service recovery affected satisfaction more strongly for consumers with high ATC, indicating a moderating role of ATC. This moderator was also supported in the link between satisfaction and complaining intentions. Also, failure severity and perceived justice influenced satisfaction, which affected repurchase intentions, word‐of‐mouth, and complaining intentions. Practical implications – Service managers should consider the differences between customers with low versus high ATC when providing recovery for a service failure. For instance, the importance of responsiveness in service recovery is even greater for those customers with high ATC, and those customers with low ATC have their complaint decision more dependent on their satisfaction level. Also, it is important to improve the customers' perceived fairness in the complaint resolution process. Originality/value – This paper investigates the key antecedents and consequences of satisfaction in a context of service failure and recovery by integrating previous research in a comprehensive model. ATC is proposed and tested as a moderator when complainers and non‐complainers are compared in the level of the strength of the relationships. Previous research has not found a moderation effect in this level.