| How businesses handle a customer's complaining behavior has been referred to as the critical “moment of truth” (Tax, Brown, and Chanrashekaran 1998) in managing and developing E-Commerce Customer Relationship Management (eCCRM). This study contends that understanding customer complaining behavior and handling customer complaints provides implications for e-business about what managerial changes should be made for effective complaint management and also for successful e-commerce customer relationship management. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of post-purchase evaluation factors on customers' propensity to complain in the online versus in-store shopping environments. In particular, this study examines how the online environment differs from the in-store environment, in terms of the relative importance of various factors on customer complaining behavior. Post-purchase evaluation factors, such as the degree of dissatisfaction, importance of the purchase, perceived benefits and costs from complaining, personal characteristics, situational influences, propensity to complain, and customer loyalty have been developed in the online context and applied in this study. More sophisticated analysis is performed by examining the effects of the post-purchase evaluation factors on propensity to complain by the product classification on the Web.; Both online and offline surveys and a longitudinal study were conducted in order to test the impacts of post-purchase evaluation factors on customers' propensity to complain in two markets (online and in-store). The results of the study provided the comparison analysis in the online versus in-store shopping environment and showed the impact of product classification on the Web. Further, the results have implications for the repeat purchase intention of customers' propensity to complain in both online and in-store shopping. This study contributes to effective complaint management, particularly for e-businesses, suggesting that certain managerial changes, such as increased service quality could result in different and more desirable behaviors, perhaps profoundly affecting customer loyalty myopia. Such myopia stems from believing that e-loyalty can be created and sustained in and by itself without regard to how complaints are handled. |
