Effects of Public Complaining and Complaint Handling on Social Media Upon Customer Satisfaction (A Case Study on Tokopedia)

Abstract

Customer satisfaction is an effort to fulfill customer needs and demand as well as to fulfill the provisions concerning its realization to balance customer expectation, and it is vital as it benefits the company. However, customers are dissatisfied at times with products or services provided by companies resulting in complaints. Public complaining is a medium used by customers to express their dissatisfaction with the use of product and services. It is made by customers who expect improvements for service failures. Public complaining is formed from identity, in handling complaints, companies take an action called service recovery as service provider to resolve service failures. Service recovery in handling complaints is based on four aspects such as empathy, speed, fairness, and accessibility. Public complaining and complaint handling have become the main focus in strategies to satisfy and to retain customers to use companies’ next products or services. Aiming at analyzing the correlation or effects of complaints and complaint handling on social media to realize customer satisfaction, the survey research employs associative method and takes Tokopedia users throughout Indonesia having made a minimum of 1 transaction and making a complaint as its population. Non-probability sampling technique with accidental sampling through a survey questionnaire and analyzed by multiple linear regression method. The findings show that customer satisfaction is affected by personal identity in public complaining, and by speed as well as accessibility in complaint handling. Based on the three affecting factors, motivation of the customer who make public complaints on social media us that they want their complaints to be read and known by other people and companies, and they expect responses and improvements to the service failures experienced. The complaints are also made on social media because it is expected that related companies would make improvement or complaint handling by offering various solutions, method and conveniences through optimal service facilities. Keywords: Public Complaining, Complaint Handling, Perceived Unfairness, Stability Attribution, Personal Identity, Empathy, Speed, Fairness, Accessibility..