Stephen Tax

Who they are

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

The affiliation on the 1998 paper and his wider career were not verified for this page, so none is asserted here. What can be said is what the paper did. It took justice theory, which had been developed for courts and workplaces, and applied it to the ordinary experience of complaining to a company, then asked how that experience shapes trust and commitment. Its three-part structure runs through most of the recovery studies described on this site.

Key papers

Tax, S. S., Brown, S. W., & Chandrashekaran, M. (1998), 'Customer Evaluations of Service Complaint Experiences: Implications for Relationship Marketing', Journal of Marketing, 62(2), 60-76, doi:10.1177/002224299806200205. Read at the level of the published abstract.

His wider publication record was not surveyed for this page.

Key ideas

The paper opens on a gap. Many companies treat complaint handling as a way to build commitment and loyalty, the authors write, but firms are not well informed about how to deal with service failures or what their complaint-handling strategies actually do.

The first finding was descriptive and blunt: a majority of the complaining customers studied were dissatisfied with their recent complaint-handling experiences.

The second was structural. Using justice theory, the authors showed that customers evaluate complaint incidents in terms of the outcomes they receive, the procedures used to arrive at the outcomes, and the nature of the interpersonal treatment during the process. Those are, in the field's vocabulary, distributive justice, procedural justice and interactional justice. The structure has since been tested at scale, most notably in Katja Gelbrich and Holger Roschk's 2011 meta-analysis, which confirmed that justice perceptions mediate between what a firm does and how satisfied and loyal its complainants become.

The third finding concerned history. The authors set competing hypotheses about how satisfaction with complaint handling and a customer's prior experience combine to shape trust and commitment. The results supported what they called a quasi brand equity view: satisfaction with complaint handling had a direct impact on trust and commitment, while prior positive experiences mitigated the effects of poor complaint handling only to a limited extent.

That last result is the useful limit on any idea of banked goodwill, including the goodwill bank described by Wayne Simmons and Tom DeWitt in The Customer Excellence Enterprise. A good history cushions a bad recovery a little. It does not excuse it. On this site the finding is read alongside DeWitt and Michael Brady's 2003 evidence that existing rapport raises satisfaction after a failure, and the two together give goodwill its proper scope.

What the finding does and does not show

The descriptive finding is easy to over-read. The paper measured the experience of customers who had recently complained, and a majority of them were dissatisfied with how it was handled. That is a statement about complainants, not about firms, so it does not show that most firms handle complaints badly. The article on what a customer apology must contain therefore reports it as a finding about customers' experience and puts its weight on the structural result, the three tests customers apply. The paper was read at the level of its published abstract, and the figures from it are the authors' own.

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