Abstract: Customer complaint handling is an important element in service management for customer satisfaction and loyalty. Little attention has been paid to the influence of social contexts on customer complaining behavior. This paper examines the impact of social contexts (i.e., the presence of a group vs. individual customer in a service failure) on customer complaining behavior. Built on the theory of social loafing effect, in this paper we propose that customers in a group believe that the outcome of a complaint depends on all customers' complaining efforts, and that individual customers' complaints are less useful. As a result, a customer is less likely to complain when the service failure occurs to a group than when it occurs to an individual customer himself or herself. We further propose that brand strength can moderate this effect. Specifically, this difference in complaining behavior between a group and an individual customer is much smaller when the brand has a strong positive impression among customers. Two experiments are conducted to test the predictions. The results of Study 1 demonstrate that participants have a lower intention to complain when they encounter the service failure in a group than when they are alone, and their perceived usefulness of complaining mediates the effect. The results of Study 2 show that for a weak brand, participants have a lower intention to complain when they are in a group than when they are alone. However, for a strong brand, this difference in complaining intention is not significant.

Key words: customer complaining, group influence, perceived usefulness of complaining, brand strength