Volume 13, Number 4 Article by D P S Verma and Gunjeet Kaur December, 2001
What the Complainant Expects: A Study of Car Users :
Understanding the antecedents, consequence and measurement of consumer satisfaction/ dissatisfaction has received increasing attention from researchers and practitioners, both in Europe and the US. However, most of the literature focusses on customer satisfaction as an outcome of the consumption experience. In contrast, the number of studies focussing on the post-complaint process, especially two-dimensional studies (both from the consumers’ point-of-view and the company’s point-of-view), is negligible. D P S Verma and Gunjeet Kaur undertook a study to bridge this gap. The specific objective of this two-dimensional study, spanning a period of three years, was to match the consumer’s expectation of the response to the complaints and the actual response of the company, and to find the resultant post-complaint level of satisfaction/dissatisfaction. The passenger car industry was chosen because while globalisation has ushered in major changes in the industry, and the Indian market has been flooded with a variety of passenger cars, the area of complaints in this industry is still neglected. Two top market shareholders of 1998, Maruti Udyog and Hindustan Motors, were chosen for the study, along with their car users who had a complaint.
The response expectations of consumers hinge upon three dimensions of justice: distributive justice (perceived fairness of the tangible outcome of a dispute); procedural justice (perceived fairness of the policies, procedures and criteria used by the decision-maker); and interactional justice (the manner in which the complainant is treated during the conflict-resolution process). The study revealed that the car user’s response expectation to his complaint consisted more of a demand for a quick resolution and a polite response to his complaint than an expectation of distributive justice or monetary compensation. The most important implication of the study is that interactional and procedural justices have an edge over distributive justice in the response expectations of car users. This has important policy implications for car companies and consumer protection agencies. It indicates a need to evolve marketing policies and legislative measures which emphasise the humane treatment of the consumer rather than the provision of distributive justice.
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