Katja Gelbrich

Who they are

This page records the public professional record only. Nothing adverse is recorded and no motive is attributed.

Her affiliation is given as the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt in the university's own publication records and news pages, which list the papers below. Her wider career was not surveyed for this page.

Two features make her work central to the question of what a recovery should contain. The first is scale: the 2011 paper pools the complaint-handling literature into a single tested path from what firms do to how loyal customers become. The second is that her later papers take the two outcome questions every manager asks, what kind of compensation and how much, and answer them separately.

Key papers

Gelbrich, K., & Roschk, H. (2011), 'A Meta-Analysis of Organizational Complaint Handling and Customer Responses', Journal of Service Research, 14(1), 24-43, doi:10.1177/1094670510387914.

Roschk, H., & Gelbrich, K. (2014), 'Identifying Appropriate Compensation Types for Service Failures: A Meta-Analytic and Experimental Analysis', Journal of Service Research, 17(2), 195-211, doi:10.1177/1094670513507486.

Gelbrich, K., Gäthke, J., & Grégoire, Y. (2015), 'How Much Compensation Should a Firm Offer for a Flawed Service? An Examination of the Nonlinear Effects of Compensation on Satisfaction', Journal of Service Research, 18(1), 107-123, doi:10.1177/1094670514543149.

All three were read at the level of their published abstracts.

Key ideas

The 2011 meta-analysis tested a path model running from organisational responses, compensation, favourable employee behaviour and organisational procedures, through the three justice perceptions, distributive, interactional and procedural, to satisfaction and then to loyalty and positive word of mouth. The results confirmed the model and the mediating role of justice and satisfaction. They also overturned a common contention. Distributive justice was the salient driver only for satisfaction with the single transaction, which in turn reinforced word of mouth. Cumulative satisfaction, the primary antecedent of loyalty, depended even slightly more on interactional justice. The relationships also varied by moderators: outcome fairness mattered most when complainants were students, and treatment mattered most when the failure was not about money or occurred in service industries.

The 2014 paper with Roschk asked what kind of compensation works. Drawing on resource exchange theory, it proposed new classifications of failure and compensation and found the strongest recovery effect when the compensation resembled the loss, with the exception that a lack of attention could be put right by other kinds of compensation as well. Immediate money generally beat delayed money.

The 2015 paper with Jana Gäthke and Yany Grégoire asked how much. Two experiments manipulated eleven compensation levels, from nothing to twice the loss, and two ways customers handle a flawed service, rejecting it or accepting it. Rejection produced an S-shaped curve, with the highest incremental effect of compensation between 60 and 120 per cent of the loss. Acceptance produced a concave curve, with the highest return from the first money invested in partial compensation. The authors' managerial point is that firms can use the shape to choose the level with the best satisfaction return.

Reading the work together

The three papers answer three different questions and are best read in sequence: what the parts of a recovery are, what kind of compensation matches what was lost, and how much is enough. The sizes in the 2015 experiments are those of the experiments, not forecasts for any one firm.

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