The Influence of Perceived Justice on Service Satisfaction and Behavioral Intentions in Service Encounters at Retail Banks in a Post-complaint Setting

Abstract

It is widely recognized that service encounters between a service provider and a customer in a retail banking environment are often prone to service failures. When these service failures occur, it is encouraged that customers engage in complaint behavior. Based upon the service recovery efforts undertaken by the service provider in response to a complaint, the customer experiences a sense of justice relating to the degree of service failure, known as perceived justice. The perceived justice customers experience from service recovery efforts could restore a sense of satisfaction amongst customers and could ultimately lead to desired behavioral responses from the customers concerned. Perceived justice and its influence on satisfaction and behavioral intention have not been investigated in the competitive South African retail banking environment that is often fraught with service failures. This paper therefore examines the influence of two dimensions of perceived justice, namely interactional justice and distributive justice on service satisfaction and behavioral intention in this context in a post-complaint setting. A sample of 281 South African respondents who experienced a service failure with a bank and who complained to the bank were surveyed using a self-administered questionnaire. A confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling (Joreskog and Sorbom 1976) were performed using SPSS/AMOS 19.0 software to test the measurement and structural properties of the research model. The research model generated satisfactory findings, and the goodness-of-fit measures were acceptable for both the measurement model and subsequently for the structural model. The results indicate satisfactory convergent validity and satisfactory reliability. The model also demonstrates acceptable discriminant validity. The empirical findings of the structural model also suggest that the tested structural model is satisfactory. All three hypothesized relationships were significant, which confirms nomological validity. The empirical findings support the notion that interactional and distributive perceived justice in banking service encounters influence the satisfaction, and in extension, behavioral intention of customers in the retail banking environment in South Africa. A service provider operating in the banking environment within this particular context has to consider the post-complaint service encounter as a critical opportunity to recover from a service failure in such a way that the customer is left with a sense of perceived justice since it influences satisfaction and ultimately behavioral intention of customers. To create a sense of perceived justice, the service provider has to ensure it interacts with customers in the post-complaint service encounter in such a way that these customers perceive the interaction to be fair, respectful, ethical, and effective. The service provider also has to ensure that the outcome of the post-complaint service encounter is perceived by these customers as being fair.