Complaining Behaviors in Restaurants New Roles in Failure Scenarios

AbstractCustomers’ complaining behavior has become a key issue in the restaurant industry. The present study investigated the effects of customer involvement, service stages and failure severity as manipulating factors on customers’ complaining behavior in fine dining restaurants. Based on a 2×4×2 between subjects experiment, data were collected from a sample of 714 randomly selected Iranian customers of 4 well known fine dining restaurants of Tehran. Public actions, negative marketing actions, and asking for recovery actions were extracted by an exploratory factor analysis as the three main components of complaint behavior. Also, a discriminant analysis was performed to determine the underlined construct of components, and 3-way factorial ANOVAs and MANOVA tests were administered to examine the effects and interactions. Most of the effects were meaningful especially in case of service stages and failure severity. Findings showed that different interactions of factors resulted in different components of c...