Designing a Model for B2B Customer Complaint Management in the Home Appliance Industry

Today, companies need to understand the wants and needs of customers more than ever to prevent customers from turning to competitors in order to better meet their needs and establish long-term business relationships with them. Customers behave differently if they are dissatisfied with a product or service. Such behaviors are called customer complaining behaviors. Recently, the importance of handling customer complaints has been highlighted. The main purpose of this study is to provide a model for customer complaints in the home appliance industry. This research is a qualitative-quantitative mixed exploratory research. The statistical population in the qualitative section included experts who were selected using the snowball method of 14 people. In a small part, the statistical population includes 120 agencies and stores in Ahvaz that sell Alborz steel products. The data collection tool in the qualitative section is semi-structured interviews and in the quantitative section the data collection tool is a researcher-made questionnaire. The Delphi technique was used to analyze the information in the qualitative part and the structural equation technique and the one-sample t-test were used in the quantitative part. The results showed that a total of 60 indicators and 10 main variables were identified to manage customer complaints in the home appliance industry, which are: Tracking customer voices, recognizing customer behavior, identifying customer expectations, interacting with customers, personnel behavior, efficient grievance system, product performance enhancement, customer satisfaction, compensatory measures and commitment and timely response.