Models of justice in service recovery efforts in airline industry

Abstract

Justice theory in Complaint handling states three types of justice sought by complainers, namely outcome justice, procedural justice and interactional justice. As many complaints and little loyalty are observed in airline sector, it seems that the customers' expectations of complaint redressal are not met. Hence, objectives of this research are: To unearth the relative importance of different types of justice in complaint redressal sought by different types of customers. To find the perceived severity and controllability of the complaint situation by customers and its effect on preference for particular type of justice. The design of this research includes two stages. In first stage, The methodology was in-depth exploratory interviews with officials of eight airlines. An open ended questionnaire was administered. Findings indicated that passengers have different expectations of justice in complaint redressal according to types. Passengers are classified according to residence as domestic, NRIs and International, according to purpose of travel as Leisure and Business passengers, and frequent and less frequent traveler according to their frequency of travel. An instrument was developed to classify the complaint situation based on perceived severity and controllability. Two Models were developed for proposed empirical testing. In the second stage, after substantial review of methodologies adopted by earlier researchers on related topics, it is proposed to test the models empirically. The findings have managerial implications of providing appropriate redress to complaints and thus can better the customer retentions rates. The research has limitation of limited number of sample which may not represent population adequately. However, effort is made to make the sample purposefully representative. The research also proposes a second level of quantitative survey over a larger number of passengers and officials to affirm the conclusions arrived at this level.