While customer complaint behavior is a critical issue for service firms, existing research has primarily focused on individual-level drivers and overlooked its social contagion mechanism. This paper aims to explore whether exposure to peers’ complaints in social networks influences an individual’s complaint behavior, and further clarify the moderating roles of network prominence and customer dependence in this relationship.
The empirical analysis uses longitudinal data from a provincial branch of a major Chinese cellular company, covering 4,579 customers over 13 months. The authors construct 13 monthly social networks based on customers’ call interactions, and use Cox proportional hazards models to test the hypotheses.
Results indicate that complaint exposure has a positive impact on an individual’s complaint behavior. Network prominence negatively moderates the relationship between complaint exposure and individual complaints while customer dependence positively moderates it. These findings remain consistent across robustness tests. Additional analyses further reveal that the effect of complaint exposure declines over time, and is more pronounced under extreme exposure conditions.
The outcomes provide actionable strategies for service firms to optimize complaint management. Firms should establish real-time social listening systems to monitor complaint clusters in social networks, implement targeted interventions for low-network-prominence customers and strengthen proactive engagement with high-dependence customers.
This study enriches the customer complaint literature by uncovering the social contagion mechanism of complaint behavior. It also extends Social Learning Theory to the domain of customer complaints by identifying network prominence and customer dependence as boundary conditions, and provides robust empirical evidence using large-scale longitudinal network data.
