Supportiveness of Internal Environment for Complaint Handling

What it measures

Measures the extent to which an organisation's human resource management (HRM) practices and corporate culture create a supportive internal environment for effective complaint handling, operationalising the organic approach to complaint management. The scale captures two facets: (1) personnel-related HRM activities, including training, goal-setting, performance evaluation, recognition, and leadership behaviour by managers; and (2) the organisational culture's general customer orientation, including attitudes toward complaints and organisational failures. Five items are reverse-coded to capture dysfunctional cultural attitudes such as viewing complaints as personal criticism or treating complainants as trouble makers. Administered to the manager with primary responsibility for complaint management. Originally 20 items; one item (financial rewards for complaint staff) was eliminated during purification.

Representative items

• In our company/business unit, employees who are responsible for complaint management are trained how to deal with complaining customers.
• In our company/business unit, managers set a good example in terms of high customer orientation in general and effective complaint management in particular.
• In our company/business unit, employees have a rather negative attitude toward customer complaints. (R)

Citation

Homburg, C., & Fürst, A. (2005). How organizational complaint handling drives customer loyalty: An analysis of the mechanistic and the organic approach. Journal of Marketing, 69(3), 95–114.