Do Recovery Efforts Have the Same Impact on Private and Public Complainants After Experiencing a Service Failure

Bibliographic Data

ID7985539
AuthorsJames Gerard Caillier (0000-0003-0127-6343, University of Alabama, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume27
Issue5
Pages588-604
Publication date2025-09-03
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePublic Integrity (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1558-0989 • E-ISSN: 1099-9922
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/10999922.2024.2365242
OpenAlexW4399731516
LanguageEN
References cited42

This study investigated service failures in a public organization, focusing on whether types of complaints (i.e., complaining publicly or privately), the exposure generated by complaints, and reperformance (i.e., expeditiously satisfying citizens' needs after the service failure) influenced perceptions of justice and complaint effectiveness. Several important findings emerged after conducting a preregistered online survey experiment with 665 respondents. First, when respondents were given vignettes detailing a well-executed reperformance after a private complaint, they did not post higher justice perceptions than those given vignettes detailing that a well-executed reperformance was conducted after a public complaint. Second, garnering high social media exposure from the complaint was only found to positively impact complaint effectiveness when individuals were given the public complaint vignette and primed with a reperformance that was not well-executed. Last, respondents who were provided with vignettes regarding public complaints were found to value the reperformance more than the exposure their complaint generated

Business · Political science · Public relations · Public service · Customer Service Quality and Loyalty · Patient Satisfaction in Healthcare · Psychology of Social Influence · Public Administration · Marketing

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