Welche Bedingungen beeinflussen die Nutzung von Kundenbeschwerden als Innovationspotenzial? Vorhersagen abgeleitet aus dem Vier-Felder-Modell der Beschwerdereaktionen

Customer complaints often contain important information on how products, services, or company processes can be improved. Even though companies generally spend large amounts of money on market research to better understand the needs of the customers, the potential for innovation available from customer complaints is rarely used. Often employees are not encouraged to deal with the customer complaints when time and resources are short. Moreover, customer complaints can be experienced as a personal assault or as an assault to the company. Consequently people are motivated to avoid conclusions threatening to the self-concept (e.g. “My performance is poor.” or “We have low quality products.”). A two-by-two model of complaining reactions can predict which personal and structural factors prevent companies from effectively using the potential in customer complaints. We describe a series of experimental and field studies testing the predictions of the model.