A New Framework to Deconstruct Customer Complaining Motivations: Based on Consumer Self-Concept and Self-Threats Perception

Based on the actual predicament of service recovery, this paper reviews the existing theories to analyze the insufficiency of explaining the customer complaining motivation, and tries to put individual self-concept into the study of customer complaints, aiming to establish a new perspective to explain customers´ cognition of service failure and how the motivation of complaining is produced. The study constructs an integrative model of customer complaining motivations in a service failure environment, in which the service failures (types) are taken as the initial independent variables ; customer self-threats perception is seen as the core intermediate variable ; self-monitoring and value orientation are introduced as moderator variables. This study is hopeful to reveal the psychological mechanism of consumer service failure cognition and complaining motivations, which is of great significance for enterprises to adopt proper service recovery strategies to rescue customer loyalty.