=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1498/HAICTA_2015_paper96
|storemode=property
|title=Antecedents and Consequences of Consumer’s Dissatisfaction of Agro-food Products and Their Complaining through Electronic Means
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1498/HAICTA_2015_paper96.pdf
|volume=Vol-1498
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/haicta/Assimakopoulos15
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==Antecedents and Consequences of Consumer’s Dissatisfaction of Agro-food Products and Their Complaining through Electronic Means==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1498/HAICTA_2015_paper96.pdf
Antecedents and Consequences of Consumer’s
Dissatisfaction of Agro-food Products and Their
Complaining through Electronic Means
Costas Assimakopoulos1
1
Department of Business Administration, Alexander Technological Educational Institute of
Thessaloniki, Greece, e-mail: casim@mkt.teithe.gr
Abstract. In this study the antecedents and the consequences of agro-food
products consumers' dissatisfaction is studied. Particularly, the main reasons
for triggering dissatisfaction are identified and ranked. Moreover, the
consumers complaining behavior is also studied and the level of e-complaining
adoption is investigated. Additionally, consumers future intentions to complain
traditionally or electronically is depicted. Finally, correlations of their
complaining behavior and intention to some demographics are found and
commented.
Keywords: consumers' satisfaction, Agro-food products, complaining
behavior, electronic means
1 Introduction
The rapid development of the Internet and e-commerce has brought changes in the
marketplace. Online communities gain importance over their traditional counterparts.
Online portals allow individuals to purchase books, movie tickets, and music CDs as
well as hospitality services. Consumers make purchase decisions based on other
customers’ opinions on the Internet.
Especially, for tourism businesses, the Internet offers the potential to make
information and booking facilities available to a large number of tourists at relatively
low costs. Many social media Websites provide online platforms within which
consumers communicate with others who have information or previous experience
about products and services. In this context, online reviews play a key role in buying
products and thus, social networking websites traffic has increased (Mauri &
Minazzi, 2013). These reviews provide customers experience and offer
recommendations to potential customers. This phenomenon is quite strong in the
hotel industry, where Gretzel (2006) stresses that 77,9% of online users is affected in
deciding “where to stay” based on online reviews. However, in areas like agro-food
products is not developed at all.
Effective analysis of online customer comments and especially of negative
comments, originating from third parties, is needed through organized service
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recovery approaches. The marketing variables entailed in third party websites are
usually those that have to do with product's quality, price, etc.
Furthermore, companies should entail the customer complaining behavior
variables in their IT systems and, especially, in the CRM software and store data
originating from third party reputation systems. This is exactly the aim of this paper.
In such a way, the CRM system will be provided with a large collection of online
customer reviews and more reliable information will be available to hotel managers.
Based on the previous thoughts and the literature review, which is presented later,
this paper attempts to investigate the consumer’s dissatisfaction related to agro-food
products and the attitude, behavior and intention of the consumer regarding his/her
complaining reaction. Particularly, the objectives of the paper are:
To investigate the profile of the sample of the research
To investigate the reasons that contribute to the consumer’s dissatisfaction
To investigate their complaining behavior
To investigate their complaining intention
To investigate whether the consumer’s characteristics are related to the degree of
the consumer’s complaining reaction
To investigate if electronic means are used and in what degree to express
complaining for agro-food products
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In section 2 the literature review is
made. In section 3 the methodology followed is described. In section 4 results are
presented and in the last section some conclusions are given.
2 Literature Review
The key-point for a company is to develop a management philosophy and a
strategy which enables it to optimize revenue and increase customer value through
understanding and satisfying the individuals customers’ needs (Liu, 2007). Individual
customer satisfaction is vital for a company. Relationship marketing is at the core of
customer –centric orientation. When a firm adopts customer-centric orientation, and
therefore exercises relationship marketing, it is attempting to develop and establish
long-term relationships with customers. Hence, it is aiming at improved customer
service and satisfaction, thus, retaining and further increasing the sales level
(Sarmaniotis and Stefanou, 2005). However, customer relationship management
(CRM) goes a step further. CRM has been defined as a management approach that
involves identifying, attracting, developing and maintaining successful customer
relationships over time in order to increase satisfaction, loyalty and retention of
profitable customers (Bradshaw and Brash 2001, Massey et al., 2001). In addition,
Fjermestad and Romano (2003) maintained and most of the authors and the
practitioners accepted that successful CRM requires attracting and keeping
economically valuable customers while repelling and eliminating economically
invaluable ones.
All companies are positive and in fact wants to collect information about their
customers. The point is the ability of the companies to facilitate the collection of, and
access to, customer information and further to exploit data mining methods
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Obviously data collection and maintenance has been identified as a critical
component of a company to enhance its relationships with the customers.
Unfortunately, it appears that there has been little consideration of the impact could
have variables such as complaining behavior, satisfaction/dissatisfaction, behavioral
loyalty including volume and frequency of purchase over time, on a company's
strategy. Even though, many studies in marketing field and CRM in particular have
shown that customer satisfaction is a critical point in achieving and retaining a
competitive advantage and can lead to brand loyalty, repurchase intention and repeat
sales (Oliver, 1999; Parasuraman and Grewal, 2000; Stefanou et al., 2003) and
finally to customer retention, instead emphasis has been given in acquiring additional
customers by a lot of companies.
Moreover, it should be noted that customer complaining is strongly related to the
notion of customer dissatisfaction. Customers usually have some expectations about
a product or service and when their expectations are not met they feel dissatisfaction
which might lead to the adoption of one or more types of complaining behavior
(Stefanou et al. ,2003). Particularly, it can be mentioned as an example that in the
hotel industry, it is very essential for hotel management to write down customer's
complaining behavior, in order to respond in such a way that dissatisfaction is
reduced and repeat business is encouraged (Nyer, 2000, Zineldin, 2006). Therefore,
consumers' complaints should be studied so that company's management could have
the opportunity to improve consumer perception of service quality. Complaints are
useful sources of information that help marketers identify sources of dissatisfaction
(Nyer, 2000). However, there is a lack of entailing the customer complaining
behavior variable in the CRM systems applied and especially in the agro-food
companies.
Gathering feedback from customers through organized marketing policies should
be a daily activity of a company in order to maintain satisfied and loyal customers
(Holloway and Beatty, 2003). The importance of having an effective system to deal
with possible problems and to handle them properly is that it increases retention rates
and creates a positive word-of-mouth (Zhang, Ye, Law and Li, 2010). There is a
range of e-channels which provide a fast and easy method to express one’s
experience (Au, Buhalis and Law, 2009), such as social media (facebook, twitter,
linkedIn), petition lists to sign, blogs, or even more to some areas special websites.
For example in the hotel industry, guests use hotel reviews sites, such as
Booking.com, tripadvisor.com, hotelchatter.com and many others to express their
feelings. Prior studies (Houser and Wooders, 2006) showed that customers seriously
consider online feedback when making purchasing decisions, and may be even
willing to pay more for products/services with good reputation. Moreover, more than
60% of consumers consult a customer feedback before making purchases
(Lightspeed Research, 2011). Ye, Law and Gu, (2009) present a quantitative analysis
that shows how a 10% improvement in reviewers' rating can increase sales figures by
4.4%.
Thus, review websites for products, or more generally electronic means of
complaining should be considered by companies and even more from agro-food
companies in order to understand their customers complaining behavior, decrease
customer dissatisfaction by increasing customer's perceived product quality. To the
best of the author's knowledge electronic complaining behavior regarding agriculture
873
food products has not been studied extensively yet, although it is a quite important
industry especially for Greece.
3 Methodology
The survey instrument was a structured questionnaire. There were questions
included which identify whether the customer had a previous bad experience with
some agro-food products. Then a group of questions investigated the complaining
behavior followed. Additionally, the profile of the consumer is investigated regarding
demographic parameters and psychographic characteristics.
720 sample members were gathered by interviews electronically or by face-to-face
interviews. The sample was not layered to the Greek population.
Descriptive statistics and significance test hypotheses are used in order to
statistically process the data. Results of the statistical analysis are followed.
4 Results and Discussions
The majority of the sample was females (54,9%). Regarding the education level of
the consumers the fourth of the sample holds a graduate degree or a post graduate
degree, 11,1% were students and the rest of the sample has up to 12 years education.
15,8% was aged up to 24 years old, 22,1% was from 25 to 34 years old, 19,3% from
34 to 44 years old and 42% more than 45 years old. 36% of the sample has an annual
income up to 10000 euros, 26% from 10001-15000 euros, 15,8% 15001-20000 euros
and the rest of the sample more than 20000 euros.
Several reasons have been identified as a source for consumers’ dissatisfaction.
23% recognized that the product's quality was not the appropriate and 22% claimed
that the product shortly degraded after buy (see Fig. 1).
The interviewees were also asked about what was the most important reason for
dissatisfaction in comparison to the others. The results are shown in Fig. 2.
Fig. 1. Reasons for dissatisfaction after buying agro-food products.
874
Fig. 2. Reasons for dissatisfaction as ranked the most important.
Regarding the complaining behavior results shown that more than 43% did
nothing or just discussed the situation with others, when they experience a problem
with an agro-food product (see Fig. 3). The electronic complaining method (i.e.
social media publication, blogging or petition signing) is around 2% of the total
reactions. The most disappointing result is that 83% intent to have a weak
complaining behavior in the future (Fig. 4). The electronic complaining remains
rather low as a percentage of the total intended reactions. Both results depicts that e-
complaining is in its infant stages in Greece contrary to other divisions of the
economy like tourism where it is quite developed. Trying to connect demographics
with the complaining behavior of the consumer it is found that gender affects
complaining behavior at a significance level less than 0,1 whereas age affects
complaining behavior at a level of 0.05.
Fig. 3. Complaining behavior of a consumer towards problems originating from agro-food
products
875
Fig. 4. Complaining intention of a consumer towards problems originating from agro-food
products
5 Conclusions
It can be seen that the product quality can be considered as one of the most
important reasons that contribute to consumer’s dissatisfaction. The latter is very
important in building stable relationships with a company's customers and hence,
maintaining customers loyal.
Product's quality is the most important reason for not having satisfied agro-food
consumers. Regarding their reactions when they face such a bad situation the so
called word-of mouth and the boycott are the most popular complaining behaviors.
This study reveals that the e-complaining is currently very low. On the other hand
word-of mouth and boycott are the most popular complaining intentions. The
intention to complain electronically is also rather low around 1%.
Finally, some demographic characteristics like gender and age are related to the
degree of the consumer’s complaining reaction.
Further research should be made in the area of identifying demographic
relationships and e-complaining behavior.
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