Organisations are facing increasing pressures in terms of customer service sincecustomers tend to become more demanding as competition within industries increases.In order to succeed in this changing marketplace, organisations should focus on formingand maintaining long-term relationships with their customers. Developing long-termrelationships, in turn, depends on the organisation?s ability to exceed customers?expectations and to continuously ensure customer satisfaction. Service organisations inparticular find it difficult to provide constant customer satisfaction due to the high level ofhuman involvement in service delivery, which often leads to inevitable service failures.Service failures, as a result, cause the disconfirmation of service expectations. Thisdisconfirmation gives rise to customer dissatisfaction, which is generally considered asthe initiator of customer complaint behaviour.Culture is regarded as one of the most influential factors affecting customers? behaviourin response to dissatisfaction with a purchase experience. Customers? culture couldhave an impact on the manner in which customers engage in complaint behaviour, andcould also have a bearing on how service failures and organisations? service recoveryefforts are perceived. Organisations functioning in a multicultural country such as SouthAfrica could therefore benefit from gaining a more profound understanding of culturalinfluences on customer behaviour and specifically complaint behaviour.The primary objective of this study was to determine the influence of culture oncustomers? complaint behaviour pertaining to service failures within the context of theSouth African banking industry. A structured, interviewer-administered questionnairewas used to collect data from banking customers residing in Gauteng, who weresampled by means of a non-probability sampling method. In total, 600 respondentsparticipated in this study, comprising 150 each from the black, coloured, Indian/Asianand white cultural groups.Results from the study indicate that although the majority of respondents have apropensity to complain, no practically significant differences were found betweenrespondents from different cultures with regard to their propensity to complain. Resultsfurthermore showed no differences between the different cultural groups in terms oftheir complaint behaviour following a hypothetical service failure. Although it was established that respondents expect the bank to do something about the service failure? in particular correcting the problem and providing an explanation for the problem ?respondents? expectations regarding service recovery and perceptions of the bank?sservice recovery efforts were found not to have been influenced by their respectivecultures. The results, in addition, showed that a higher service recovery effort had amore positive effect on respondents? post-recovery satisfaction, likelihood of maintainingtheir relationship with the bank and loyalty, than that of a lower service recovery effort.It is recommended that banks should not view their customers differently in terms oftheir cultural backgrounds, but that they should rather focus continuously on providingall customers with the same level of quality service, even after a service failure hasoccurred. Banks should also encourage all customers to voice complaints directly tothem in order to minimise the harmful effects of negative word-of-mouth and to improverecoveries from failures. Since respondents in this study indicated that they expectbanks to offer an apology in the case of a service failure, to provide an explanation ofthe cause of the problem and to correct the problem, banks should ensure that a highlevel of quality interaction takes place between the dissatisfied customer and employeesfollowing a service failure. Such an approach requires banks to ensure that theiremployees are motivated and competent to solve customers? problems. It is thereforealso recommended that banks should invest resources in employee selection, training,development, empowerment, discretionary decision-making power and support in orderto ensure that customer-facing employees are able to provide a satisfactory servicerecovery, and are able to efficiently manage the complaint process.Recommendations for future research include extending this study to other servicesettings in order to determine whether there are similarities or differences in theinfluence of culture on customers? complaint behaviour pertaining to service failures.Future research can be conducted in collaboration with a specific bank in order todiscover more specific information with regards to service failures and complaintsituations within the bank, as well as customers? perceptions of the bank?s existingservice recovery systems. Finally, since no differences between cultural groups werefound, this study can be replicated in order to compare South African customers withthose in other countries in order to determine differences in national cultures.
