Customer opportunistic complaints management: A critical incident approach

Although customer complaints are valued in the hospitality industry in order to create service recovery opportunities and improve service quality, there are occasions when customers knowingly and incorrectly report service failures or make illegitimate complaints. The purpose of this study is to investigate how service employees handle opportunistic customer complaints in service encounters. By using the critical incident technique, we classify 346 incidents from hotel and restaurant services based on complaint source, evidence, compensation, handling, follow-up, and customer return. Managerial implications for these challenging situations are discussed and suggestions are made for improvement.

► We examined how employees handled customers’ opportunistic complaints.
► Employees often had circumstantial clues regarding the complaints.
► Hotels were more conservative that restaurants in terms of compensation.
► More hotel employees were trained than restaurant employees.