Moshe Davidow

Who they are

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

The 2003 paper gives his affiliation as the University of Haifa. His wider career and later record were not surveyed for this page.

Key papers

Davidow, M. (2003), 'Organizational Responses to Customer Complaints: What Works and What Doesn't', Journal of Service Research, 5(3), 225-250, doi:10.1177/1094670502238917. Read from a publisher-hosted copy of the full text.

The review also reports results from his own earlier study (Davidow, 2000), which was not read for this page.

Key ideas

The review's purpose, in its own words, is to clarify what is really known or not known about the effect of each dimension of a complaint response on what the customer does afterwards, such as repurchase and word of mouth. Its six dimensions are these.

Timeliness is the perceived speed with which the organisation responds to or handles a complaint. The evidence was mixed, and Davidow proposed that timeliness may only be a critical factor after an unreasonable delay.

Facilitation is the set of policies, procedures and structures that support customers in complaining. It had the steadiest record on satisfaction: eight of nine studies found a positive effect, though its effects on word of mouth and repurchase were mixed.

Redress is the benefit or outcome the customer receives, the compensation. It was well supported for satisfaction, with the ideal amount left unresolved.

Apology is the acknowledgement of the complainant's distress. At the time of the review it was one of the least studied dimensions and its results were mixed.

Credibility is the organisation's willingness to explain or account for the problem. In his own earlier study, the review reports, credibility had a significant impact on satisfaction and repurchase intentions.

Attentiveness is the interpersonal communication between the organisation's representative and the customer. The same earlier study rated it the single most important dimension.

Read against the justice framework, timeliness and facilitation are procedural justice, redress is distributive justice, and apology, credibility and attentiveness are interactional justice. The later experimental work, including Holger Roschk and Susanne Kaiser's 2013 study of the components of an apology, fills in parts of the gaps the review identified.

How the review is used

The article on what a customer apology must contain relies on Davidow's review for two things. The first is the finding on facilitation: eight of the nine studies he reviewed found that making a complaint easy raised satisfaction, a steadier record than timeliness could show. The second is credibility, the firm's willingness to account for what went wrong, which the review reports as having had a significant effect on satisfaction and on intentions to buy again in his own earlier study.

The review is also a source of caution. It describes the apology dimension as one of the least studied at the time, with mixed results, and the experimental work that followed, such as Roschk and Kaiser's 2013 study of empathy, intensity and timing, filled in part of that gap. The ranking of attentiveness as the single most important dimension comes from his earlier study as reported in the review, which was not read directly, so the article states it with that limit.

One further point from the review is that redress, the compensation, was well supported for satisfaction while the ideal amount was left unresolved. Gelbrich and colleagues' 2015 experiments, which tested eleven levels of compensation, address that open question directly, finding satisfaction climbed fastest between about 60 and 120 per cent of the loss for customers who had rejected the flawed service.

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