Justice in handling complaints and its impact on satisfaction and loyalty in higher education

Abstract

Problem and aim. In providing services to students, universities often get complaints from students as customers. Universities must respond to and resolve complaints wisely and fairly to satisfy students with the services provided. The article aims to measure student complaint-handling strategies and their effect on satisfaction and loyalty as customers. The study will examine whether justice in addressing students' complaints, interactional justice, procedural justice, and distributive justice affect student satisfaction and does student satisfaction mediate the relationship between complaint-handling strategies and student loyalty. Research methods. The study involved 328 students from several universities in Indonesia. Samples selected using the purposes sampling method. Data were analysed quantitatively using SmarPLS version 3.3.3. Results. The study resulted that interactional justice significantly affected student satisfaction with a value of 0.019 < 0.05. Procedural justice significantly affects student satisfaction with a value of 0.000 < 0.05, and distributive justice significantly affects student satisfaction with a value of 0.014 < 0.05. This study also found that student satisfaction mediated the relationship between interactional justice, procedural justice, distributive justice and student loyalty with a significance level of value < 0.05. Conclusion. This study confirms that the fair and wise handling of student complaints affects student satisfaction with higher education services and can potentially increase student loyalty. This study strengthens several previous studies, emphasizing that fair complaint handling at companies and other institutions affects customer satisfaction and loyalty. Therefore, universities should care for student satisfaction and loyalty by continuously improving service handling student complaints, both interactional, procedural, and distributive.