Proactive handling of flight overbooking:How to reduce negative eWOM and the costs of bumping customers

This research examines the extent to which proactivity in handling flight overbooking reduces negative electronic word-of-mouth (NeWOM) and the required costs of compensation, thus increasing firm profitability. It answers recent calls to use a multimethod approach (i.e., we include archival data, qualitative interviews, seven experiments, and a Monte Carlo simulation for a total of ten studies), and to adapt recovery to specific contexts (i.e., airlines) and heterogeneous customers (i.e., voluntary/involuntary bumping or offloading). The preliminary studies indicate that overbooking and offloading are pervasive and that a proactive approach is both feasible and desirable. The experiments show that, compared to the default reactive approach (informing passengers at the gate), a proactive approach (informing them before they leave for the airport) substantially reduces NeWOM and the sought compensation. Further, a very reactive approach (informing them in the plane) significantly increases NeWOM and the sought compensation, especially when offloading occurs involuntarily. We also unveil the mechanism explaining the effects of proactivity on NeWOM, through the serial mediation of justice and betrayal. Finally, the results of a Monte Carlo simulation show that offering reduced compensation through a proactive approach allows more aggressive overbooking, higher capacity utilization and increased net revenue of up to 1.3%

Improvement complaining: When complainers have the solution to the problem

International audienceThis working paper studies a new conceptual approach of customers' complaints that we called " improvement complaining ". The underlying idea is that customers' dissatisfaction can be turned into a creative learning process. Indeed, dissatisfaction is often considered as one of the strongest antecedents leading to creativity (Boichuk & Menguc, 2013; Carbonell et al. 2009; Duverger, 2012; Füller, 2010; Zhou & George, 2001). Many successful products have been suggested by dissatisfied customers or employees (e.g. McDonald's Filet-O-Fish or Starbucks' Frappuccino). Accordingly, we define improvement complaining as the expression of customer's voice following a service failure in which he or she expresses innovative suggestions to improve the firm's practices and/or services. The main question is: " What influence customers' willingness to share ideas while complaining? " To the best of our knowledge, no study has examined the creative potential of customers' complaints and this one can fill that literature gap, about how a service failure may be the starting point for the innovation process In sum, this work is motivated by three questions related to improvement complaining. Our first research question is about improvement complaining's occurrence. For that, we run a content analysis on 375 complaint letters collected from a French bank's database and find that around 3.5% of customers' complaints can be considered as an improvement complaint. Secondly, we question the customers' motives associated with improvement complaining. Our results show that this complaint is more related with others-oriented motives (company and other customers) compared to other complaining forms. Finally, our third question examines the effect of the organizational climate on complaint intentions. We find that when organizational climate is favorable, customers are more open to complain in an innovative and less in a vindictive way

The role of customers' formal ownership on their engagement behaviors

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How to respond to ideas from complainers?

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