现有的关于向企业进行抱怨的研究均建立在"理性人"的假设之上,而忽视了消费者同时作为"社会人"需要遵循一定的规范。本文引入关系规范的概念(共有关系规范,交换关系规范),通过实验的方法探究其对消费者的抱怨意愿及潜在动机的影响。实验一的结果显示在服务失误水平低的情况下,共有关系规范下的被试相对于交换关系规范下的被试更乐意向企业抱怨,而在服务失误水平高的情况下,这种差异不显著。实验二进一步验证了这种关系,并发现共有关系规范下的被试向企业抱怨,是为了帮助其发现和改进服务中存在的问题,以提高服务质量,具有利他动机。
For a service provider,there are many "nice" customers who never complain and never come back. However,if a dissatisfied customer does not complain,the service provider may miss the opportunity to identify the source of an operational problem and to make amends to consumers for a service failure. As a result,service provider may lose that customer along with that customer's future profit. From this perspective,customers should be encouraged to complain about service quality,especially process quality which is more difficult to control and more likely to fail. Although many factors influencing consumers' complaint intention have been proved by researchers,relationship between consumers and service provider is rarely considered. Thus,this paper tries to explore the role of relationship norm in consumers' complaint behavior. Although relationship with non-social subjects is different from social relationship,recent research in marketing notes that consumers often form relationships with brands that mirror interpersonal relationship in social context and use norms of these relationships as a lens to evaluate the brand and its actions. Extant literature has classified interpersonal relationship into two kinds according to their behavioral norms. One is exchange relationship norm in which people are motivated for interacting with others to get something from them and concerned with what they receive for what they give. The other one is communal relationship norm in which the motivation for interacting with others is to satisfy their needs because of a genuine concern for their well being. Based on these arguments,this study proposes that consumers also form these two different relationships with the service provider and use norms of these relationships to guide their complaint behavior when there is a service failure. We propose an interaction effect of relationship norm and magnitude of service failure on consumer's complaint intention. Specifically,when the magnitude of service failure is high,consumers