Political affiliations of consumers and their effect on service failures

Abstract

With the distance between companies and consumers decreasing, it has become extremely easy for customers to complain and access redressal and recovery strategies from companies. We also see that a customer’s overall satisfaction with a service largely depends on their perception of fairness and their experience throughout the recovery process. Their perception depends on their socio-cultural and psychological factors, and thus, political ideology emerges as one of its key drivers. We investigate the relation between likelihood of a customer churning, political ideology of the customer, recovery mechanism attributes (such as compensation provided, politeness of customer service executive). We find that political ideology does influence these parameters to a certain extent. Using this understanding, we propose a few recovery strategies that firms can adopt to improve the customer satisfaction thus reducing churn.