How does a company know what its customers want? There is both a need and an opportunity to capture customer wishes in the case of services. Transaction data is not enough, which provides only a partial answer. This research is to investigate factors that can contribute to customer verbalization and staff recording of customer desires. We extend the existing model of consumer complaint behavior to apply to customer wishes, not only complaints or other responses to dissatisfaction, and introduce the notion of relationship as a predictor of customer's inclination to verbalize their wishes and complaints. Furthermore, we introduce a second stage to the model, after the consumer has verbalized his/her wish or complaint, to reflect the probability of staff recording the wish or complaint fo...[ Read more ]

How does a company know what its customers want? There is both a need and an opportunity to capture customer wishes in the case of services. Transaction data is not enough, which provides only a partial answer. This research is to investigate factors that can contribute to customer verbalization and staff recording of customer desires. We extend the existing model of consumer complaint behavior to apply to customer wishes, not only complaints or other responses to dissatisfaction, and introduce the notion of relationship as a predictor of customer's inclination to verbalize their wishes and complaints. Furthermore, we introduce a second stage to the model, after the consumer has verbalized his/her wish or complaint, to reflect the probability of staff recording the wish or complaint for future use.