Firms' strategies when answering customer complaints [Firms' strategies when answering customer complaints]
Past research has focused on the customer side rather than on the firms' side when examining behaviors based on customer satisfaction, in particular customer loyalty. Yet, we still know very little about actual firms' practices in a complaint setting and their effect on actual customer behavior. We try to tackle these issues by using for the first time a set of primary data that allows to apply the justice theory framework and show precisely how firms answer to complaints. The first part of this research was dedicated to defining and measuring politeness of firms' answers to customer complaints. The antecedents of politeness (which is a component of justice theory) had surprisingly not been studied; we knew very little about what actually influenced perceived politeness and which antecedents had the biggest effect. The results of this research were presented at the http://www.esade.edu/research-webs/eng/rnmr13> 5th International Conference on Rhetoric and Narratives in Management Research held in Barcelona. This presentation ended with managerial recommendations on 'http://blog.intotheminds.com/50-of-complaints-answered-without-apology-bad-for-customer-satisfaction/ how to increase customer satisfaction in a complaint setting. Ongoing and upcoming researches on justice theory :- Improve our understanding of factors influencing the perception of politeness: we are currently planning an experiment to reveal the possible interactions existing between spelling mistakes, education level and perceived politeness in French language. As anticipated by Marcoccia (2005) we believe that the online communication channels have changed the landscape, in particular as far as politeness and complaint resolution are concerned. - Validate the politeness quantitative model on a larger sample : a sample of ca. 1000 answers is currently being investigated to validate our findings on politeness and enhance the validity of the correlations found.- Enhance the sample analysis with the other dimensions of justice theory: in a next step (2014) we plan to reuse our sample and apply the whole framework of justice theory to reveal the most important patterns when firms answer to customer complaints. [Past research has focused on the customer side rather than on the firms' side when examining behaviors based on customer satisfaction, in particular customer loyalty. Yet, we still know very little about actual firms' practices in a complaint setting and their effect on actual customer behavior. We try to tackle these issues by using for the first time a set of primary data that allows to apply the justice theory framework and show precisely how firms answer to complaints. The first part of this research was dedicated to defining and measuring politeness of firms' answers to customer complaints. The antecedents of politeness (which is a component of justice theory) had surprisingly not been studied; we knew very little about what actually influenced perceived politeness and which antecedents had the biggest effect. The results of this research were presented at the http://www.esade.edu/research-webs/eng/rnmr13> 5th International Conference on Rhetoric and Narratives in Management Research held in Barcelona. This presentation ended with managerial recommendations on 'http://blog.intotheminds.com/50-of-complaints-answered-without-apology-bad-for-customer-satisfaction/ how to increase customer satisfaction in a complaint setting. Ongoing and upcoming researches on justice theory :- Improve our understanding of factors influencing the perception of politeness: we are currently planning an experiment to reveal the possible interactions existing between spelling mistakes, education level and perceived politeness in French language. As anticipated by Marcoccia (2005) we believe that the online communication channels have changed the landscape, in particular as far as politeness and complaint resolution are concerned. - Validate the politeness quantitative model on a larger sample : a sample of ca. 1000 answers is currently being investigated to validate our findings on politeness and enhance the validity of the correlations found.- Enhance the sample analysis with the other dimensions of justice theory: in a next step (2014) we plan to reuse our sample and apply the whole framework of justice theory to reveal the most important patterns when firms answer to customer complaints.]

Customer satisfaction in Small and Medium Enterprises [Customer satisfaction in Small and Medium Enterprises]
Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) account for more than 99% of firms in Belgium and at the European level about 95% percent of firms are SME's. The socio-economic impact of SME's going out of business is tremendous which explains why authorities and institutions are dedicating so many resources to assist and help SME's. Crutzen (2009) showed that twenty-eight percent of bankruptcies are due to deficiencies in strategic management and among others to a misalignment with the market, underlying thus the importance of marketing. The importance of marketing within SMEs is also recognized by Knight (2000): «for most companies, because it tends to be the nexus of the strategic gestalt, skillful marketing strategy can be the most important requirement for success».Among modern marketing, customer satisfaction is one major construct. It has attracted the attention of practitioners because of the popularized relationship between customer satisfaction and loyalty and further between loyalty and profits. Satisfying customer might therefore be a cornerstone for the success of SMEs and yet no comprehensive research has been dedicated to it in this context. After reviewing thoroughly the different streams of literature on http://blog.intotheminds.com/the-relevance-of-customer-satisfaction-in-sme customer satisfaction theories, antecedents and practices, our current research focuses on understanding small business owners' perception and practices on customer satisfaction.More than 20 qualitative interviews have been carried out so far with businesses mirroring the structure of the Brussels economy. [Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) account for more than 99% of firms in Belgium and at the European level about 95% percent of firms are SME's. The socio-economic impact of SME's going out of business is tremendous which explains why authorities and institutions are dedicating so many resources to assist and help SME's. Crutzen (2009) showed that twenty-eight percent of bankruptcies are due to deficiencies in strategic management and among others to a misalignment with the market, underlying thus the importance of marketing. The importance of marketing within SMEs is also recognized by Knight (2000): «for most companies, because it tends to be the nexus of the strategic gestalt, skillful marketing strategy can be the most important requirement for success».Among modern marketing, customer satisfaction is one major construct. It has attracted the attention of practitioners because of the popularized relationship between customer satisfaction and loyalty and further between loyalty and profits. Satisfying customer might therefore be a cornerstone for the success of SMEs and yet no comprehensive research has been dedicated to it in this context. After reviewing thoroughly the different streams of literature on http://blog.intotheminds.com/the-relevance-of-customer-satisfaction-in-sme customer satisfaction theories, antecedents and practices, our current research focuses on understanding small business owners' perception and practices on customer satisfaction.More than 20 qualitative interviews have been carried out so far with businesses mirroring the structure of the Brussels economy.]