Toward E-Knowledge Based Complaint Management

Service failure and recovery is a well-established area of services research. Research has shown that service recovery is critically important from a managerial perspective in terms of maintaining customer relationships. Yet few firms excel at handling service failures. There is a growing number of managers who claim that customers tend to be dissatisfied with their service recovery effort. Their employees cannot improve service processes when they experience recovery situations and their companies still do not learn from service failure. [19] attribute the service recovery ineffectiveness to the competing interests of managing employees, customers and processes. We agree with their contention that to address these criticisms, complaint management must acknowledge and find new approaches to achieve consistency and to correct the misalignment of interests that can exist between the actions of the organisation and the needs of its customers and employees. We believe that search in the customer knowledge management literature represents one effective means to enhance a firm ability to implement a cohesive service recovery strategy. A comprehensive based knowledge creation system framework where the Socialization, Externalization, Combination and Internalization (SECI) modes, and various ‘ba’ proposed by Nonaka and Konno are introduced for complaint management. Empirical research, involving a case study is presented to illustrate the proposed framework. This framework is believed to pave the way for e-knowledge based complaint management.