The Voice of Consumers in Social Media: A Framework to Effective Complaint Management

Abstract

Due to the advances in information technology, consumers are increasingly active towards complaints, suggestions and opinions, mainly in specialized platforms for this purpose. Manage complaints successfully may represent building a positive brand image, that, naturally, can bring many benefits to the organization. In contrast, a poor negative electronic word-of-mouth handling or even the lack of it can have an impact on the company reputation. A negative rating is judged by the readers as a much more reliable and useful review, thus, the online complaint is more prominent and spread more readily. This research had as objective to analyze the strategies used by the companies in online complaint handling and to purpose an effective management model. Therefore, a descriptive research was carried out through the analysis of 379 complaints published on the website ReclameAQUI (www.reclameaqui.com.br) referring to four big retail companies: Lojas Americanas, Magazine Luiza, Submarino e Ponto Frio. The study described analytically the strategies used by the analyzed stores, pointing out possible hits and errors. Furthermore, it was possible to identify the factors that consumers valued most in the companies after a failed product or service, as well as to direct the organization to the ways to be taken for an improvement on its processes and, consequently, to improve the company’s results and indexes.