Complainer Emotions and Loyalty

The idea that specific emotions might lead to idiosyncratic reactions and that in some cases positive emotions may also be aroused during the complaint experience has been largely neglected. The study explores this issue by identifying specific emotions experienced by complainers and then relating them to resulting complainer loyalty levels, separately under conditionswhere the outcomes of the complaint process is evaluated favorably versus unfavorably. Complaint texts posted on a well-known website are content analyzed and six types of emotions (hopeful, puzzled, recessive, befooled, offended, and hypersensitive, three types of texting styles (general, specific, and threatening), and five types of complainer concerns (financial, technical, psychological, social, and physical) are identified via content analyses.

In this study, emotion categories are defined based on data in contrast to previous studieswhich provide one-dimensional content analyses directed by pre-determined rules. For this purpose, actual complaint texts voluntarily made by the members of an online complaint website are content analyzed.

This site is called “Sikayetvar.com”, where ŞikayetVarmeans “I have a complaint to make.” The complaint is visible to the general public and to the company in question who may or may not reply. Oneweek after the complaint is posted on thewebsite, each complainer is asked to rate the company’s efforts to resolve the complaint (solution score) and provide another score about his or her intention to repurchase the same brand in the future(loyalty score).

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Resource: An asymmetric configural model approach for understanding complainer emotions and loyalty, Berna Tari Kasnakoğlu, Cengiz Yılmaz, Kaan Varnali