During the last decade, customer complaint management received considerable attention in marketing literature, e.g., researchers examined the consequences of a negative incident on customer attitudes towards the provider and the associated behavioral intention such as self-reported repurchase intentions ( e.g. Evanschitzky, Brock, and Blut, 2011; Smith and Bolton, 2002; van Doorn and Verhoef, 2008). However, this stream of research has not examined actual purchase behavior after the complaint (e.g., de Matos, Henrique, and Rossi, 2007). Hence, it is unclear whether service recovery only affects self-reported outcomes (i.e., purchase intention) or actual purchase behavior. Moreover, recent research has indicated that customer inertia explains a large proportion of the variance of a customer’s repurchase behavior (e.g. van Doorn and Verhoef, 2008). So far, no research has assessed the impact of inertia in the service recovery context. It is indicated that the relationship between the provider and the customer is strongly affected by the service failure (van Doorn and Verhoef, 2008), but as of now, the role of past behavior has not been investigated. This study contributes to the complaint management literature by (1) analyzing the effects of service recovery on actual purchase behavior after recovery and (2) by assessing the role of inertia in situations of service recovery. Results indicate that complaint satisfaction has a significant positive impact on post complaining purchase behavior while overall satisfaction has no such effect. Furthermore, past purchase behavior has the strongest impact; thus, inertia plays a substantial role in complaint management.

• Christian Brock(University of Rostock, Germany)
• Markus Blut(Aston University, UK)
• Heiner Evanschitzky(Aston University, UK)