Do Recovery Efforts Have the Same Impact on Private and Public Complainants After Experiencing a Service Failure?

This study investigated service failures in a public organization, focusing on whether types of complaints (i.e., complaining publicly or privately), the exposure generated by complaints, and reperformance (i.e., expeditiously satisfying citizens' needs after the service failure) influenced perceptions of justice and complaint effectiveness. Several important findings emerged after conducting a preregistered online survey experiment with 665 respondents. First, when respondents were given vignettes detailing a well-executed reperformance after a private complaint, they did not post higher justice perceptions than those given vignettes detailing that a well-executed reperformance was conducted after a public complaint. Second, garnering high social media exposure from the complaint was only found to positively impact complaint effectiveness when individuals were given the public complaint vignette and primed with a reperformance that was not well-executed. Last, respondents who were provided with vignettes regarding public complaints were found to value the reperformance more than the exposure their complaint generated.