An Analysis of Online Customer Complaints: Implications for Web Complaint Management

How businesses resolve customer complaining behavior effectively has been considered a “defensive marketing” strategy [12] or a “zero-defections” [22] strategy, which diminishes customer dissatisfaction. Handling customer dissatisfaction accompanies Web customer complaint management, which might be the critical issue for online customer service solutions and e-CRM. In this paper, the authors 1) investigate the current sources and causes of online complaints; 2) seek effective ways of handling customer complaints by examining different product types; and 3) provide guidelines for successful e-CRM. One thousand customer complaints from three different publicized ebusiness customer service centers and five hundred complaints from online feedback systems were analyzed in this study. The research findings suggest that ebusinesses should 1) provide excellent online customer services because customer service is the most important factor in online customer satisfaction; 2) respond to customers’ requests/complaints fast because the response speed is more important in online customer satisfaction than offline; and 3) employ strategies that are appropriate for the product category in question. 0-7695-1435-9/02 $1