Social Class Differences in Complaining Strategies Used by Customers of Central Santosa Finance

Abstract

This study deals with complaining strategies in different social class. The objectives of this study were to find out the types of complaining strategies used by customers as the complainers and the reasons of the customers used complaint strategies. To achieve the objectives, this study was conducted by applying qualitative research. It is a kind of multi-case study. The subjects of this study were the customers of Central Santosa Finance with different social class, namely working class and middle class. And the objects of this research were the utterances which contained complaining strategies uttered by the customers. The data were collected by using content analysis technique. The data were analyzed based on the theory of complaining strategies proposed by Trosborg (1995) and the interview was conducted to get the answer of the reasons why customers used complaint strategies. Based on the results of this study, the customers from working class dominantly used Explicit Blame and Modified Blame as their complaint strategies. While the customers from middle class tended to use Hints as their complaint strategy which meant that customers form working class were more direct in saying their complaints than customers from middle class. The reasons of they used complaint strategies were Situation and Problem.