Complaint Handling and Post-Complaint Satisfaction of Customers of Eateries in Port Harcourt, Nigeria (original) (raw)

Service failure is a phenomenon that has continued to characterize service industries. Though firms strive to deliver excellent service, human and nonhuman errors have made zero-defect service delivery a mere wish. Complaint handling serve as a cogent remedy for customer issues arising from unsatisfactory service deliveries. The current study examined the link between complaint handling and post-complaint satisfaction of customers of eateries in Port Harcourt. The study adopted a descriptive research design and employed the use of questionnaire as the instrument of inquiry. Data collected from four hundred and fifteen (415) respondents was utilized in the final analysis of the study, using the Spearman's rank order correlation (rho) as the test statistic and relying on SPSS version 16.0. Based on the analyses, the study found that complaint handling and post-complaint satisfaction have a positive and significant correlation; as all the dimensions of complaint handling considered in the study were found to have strong positive links with post-complaint satisfaction. The study thus concludes that post-complaint satisfaction is significantly influenced by complaint handling through customer-firm interaction, complaining accessibility and compensation policy; and recommends that eateries in Port Harcourt that desire a satisfied customer base should promote friendly, polite and honest interactions with complaining customers and institute accessible complaint procedures to enable customer lodge complaints when the need arise.