The Relationship between Customer ' s Cognitive Evaluations , Affective Responses and Complaint-Handling Satisfaction ( A Case Study of Tejarat Bank and Parsian Bank in Tehran )

Background/Objectives: This study aimed to investigate the relationship between cognitive evaluations (i.e. perceived justice, perceived complaint-handling performance, disconfirmation of expectations, recovery expectations), and satisfaction with complaint-handling considering the moderator role of affective responses (positive and negative emotions). Methods/Statistical analysis: The research was an applied study. The research method was descriptive-correlative, and the data-gathering method was field study. The research population consisted of those customers of Tejarat Bank and Parsian Bank in Tehran who had experienced at least one service failure in the date ended to Jul 23, 2014 and they had complained. The simple consisted of 246 customers, and the sampling method was two-level cluster sampling. A 5-scale questionnaire was used to collect the data. Its validity confirmed by university professors and specialist in this field, and the reliability was determined using Cronbach's Alpha test ( 83 / 0 = ). Descriptive statistics was used to describe the status of examinees. Kolmogrov-Smirnov's Test was used to determine if the data were normal. Pearson's correlation test and step-by-step regression was applied to investigate the significance of hypotheses. Results/Findings: The results showed that there is significant relationship between customer's cognitive evaluations and their affective responses with satisfaction of complaint-handling. Conclusion/Application: Therefore, it is necessary that banks to provide a realistic picture of their organization to customers, train their employees, reinforce them and give them the authority and responsibility to establish appropriate communications with complained customers. In short, the management must assume a leadership oriented towards providing an excellent complete service so that the importance of achieving satisfactory recoveries is passed on to the employees.


Introduction 1.
Traditionally, the quality of products and services were evaluated based on their physical characteristics, such as durability and reliability, but nowadays most companies reevaluated the concept of quality.They have found that the best products would not considered as ideal if they don't meet the customers' needs, wants and expectations.However, the sensitivity of providing service to customers sometimes leading to a mismatch between the customer's expectations and provided services, and in most cases he will be disappointed.Some unsatisfied customers do complain due to their cognitive appraisals and experience emotional responses in the service recovery process.Researchers estimate that a quarter of consumers are dissatisfied in any given moment, but few of them bother themselves to complain and in some cases 95% of them continue without objection [1,2,3].So, the cause of discontent must be recognized and resolved.To find out what should be done to satisfy customers and create a system to maintain their consent would be the main challenge for companies and organizations in the future.The competition becomes tougher and customers are away from companies that offer poor quality and services.Companies that realized the importance of customers successfully entered the 21 st century [4].The study sought to identify the relationship between cognitive evaluations and customer's complaint-handling satisfaction with regard to the role of affective responses (positive or negative emotions) that customers experience in the process of service recovery.ISSN 2039-9340 (print) Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences MCSER Publishing, Rome-Italy Vol 6 No 3 S2 May 2015 693 Hypotheses 2.

Main Hypotheses
1.There is significant relationship between customers' cognitive evaluations and their complaint-handling satisfaction.2. There is significant relationship between customers' affective responses experienced in service recovery and their complaint-handling satisfaction.

Sub hypotheses
1.There is significant relationship between perceived complaint-handling performance and the complainthandling satisfaction.2. There is significant relationship between recovery expectation and the complaint-handling satisfaction.3.There is significant relationship between disconfirmation of expectations and the complaint-handling satisfaction.4.There is significant relationship between perceived justice and the complaint-handling satisfaction.5.There is significant relationship between positive emotions and the complaint-handling satisfaction.6.There is significant relationship between negative emotions and the complaint-handling satisfaction.7. Positive emotions moderate the relation between perceived complaint-handling performance and the complaint-handling satisfaction.8. Positive emotions moderate the relationship between recovery expectation and the complaint-handling satisfaction.9. Positive emotions moderate the relationship between disconfirmation of expectations and the complainthandling satisfaction.10.Positive emotions moderate the relationship between perceived justice and the complaint-handling satisfaction.11.Negative emotions moderate the relation between perceived complaint-handling performance and the complaint-handling satisfaction.12. Negative emotions moderate the relationship between recovery expectation and the complaint-handling satisfaction.13.Negative emotions moderate the relationship between disconfirmation of expectations and the complainthandling satisfaction.14.Negative emotions moderate the relationship between perceived justice and the complaint-handling satisfaction.

Literature Review 3.
Focus on the consumers' needs is a major factor in marketing trends.Today, many companies and nonprofit organizations have embraced the new marketing concepts and act accordingly.They have realized that focusing on customer needs means paying attention to product quality and to service the customers [5].Customer service includes all activities that the company can do to add value to its products.Successful companies in the marketing have understood the importance of product quality and customer service.They know that the quality is more than a product features and customer service is more than responding to the complaints.However, handling customer complaints is an activity that creates added value for customers and plays important role in customer satisfaction and therefore its impact on the marketing mix [6].So, given the importance of customer satisfaction and complaint handling, the theoretical foundations of the field of customer satisfaction and in particular the satisfaction of the complaint handling are expressed.
Sander Svari et al. [7] examined the relationship between perceived justice structure in negative service encounter and complaint-handling in the Norwegian tourism industry.Their goal was to investigate the similarities and differences between perceived justice and complaint-handling and its structural reliability.For this purpose, they used a triangular approach based on interviews and surveys in the tourism industry in Norway.The results showed that the four dimensions of justice must be converted to three dimensions and the interactional justice should be split into two dimensions as "interpersonal justice" and "justice information".It should be noted that these dimensions were tested by parallel confirmatory factor analysis and estimates showed a satisfactory fit.Schoefer [8] investigated the role of cognition and affect in the formation of customer satisfaction judgments concerning service recovery encounters.His study shows that both cognitive and affective impacts affect judgment and consent of recovery.The results also suggest that perceived justice impact satisfaction through emotions, both directly and indirectly.
Although many studies have been done in the area of customer satisfaction in Iranian banks, very few studies have been done on customer complaints and how to handle these complaints.

Complaint-handling satisfaction
Marketing experts don't agree on a comprehensive definition of customer satisfaction, but most of them suggested the definition proposed by Oliver [4].According to Oliver [4], "customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction includes the consumers' judgment about success or failure of the company to meet customer expectations so that to meet the expectations leads to satisfaction and failure to meet expectations results in dissatisfaction." So when a client gets in touch with an organization's for goods or services and his expectations are not fulfilled positively, dissatisfaction arises in him that two cases arise: either the customer complain or protest and leave the organization while is dissatisfaction.The best mode is when he complains because the information obtained during the complaint-handlings can improve the organization's processes and products and if the process performs successfully, it entails the potential to improve the image of the organization, regardless of its size, location and industrial sector.

Service Recovery
All service organizations sometimes stand in situations where clients encounter service failures in one or more dimensions of quality of service provided.In such circumstances, organizations must pay to customer dissatisfaction.Measures the provider performs to compensate and correct the service failure are called "service recovery".Service recovery can be defined as a second exposure to the service.When customers experience some failure in service or service provider and his expectations are not met, another expectation will be activated which is called "service recovery expectation."[1].Service recovery is providing the answer to what is perceived as a service failure and is referred to the proceedings that can be taken by the organizations to prevent customer's diversion or to modify it [5].
Need to service recovery systems emerged from the components of the business environment and the factors associated with patterns of customer complaints and organizations' responses.The business environment is characterized by increased consumer awareness and complexity; Consumer demand for higher quality services are already, and when they do not get the expected quality, their discontent arises.Therefore, to meet their expectations both in the primary service providing or the service recovery is a component of differentiation and competitive advantage [9,10].

Disconfirmation of Expectations
"Disconfirmation of Expectations" is another component of cognitive evaluation components.Disconfirmation of Expectations can increase customer satisfaction if the customer's perception of response to service failure positively affirms the previous expectations of recovery [11].Conversely, a response to recovery that negatively affirms the expectations will reduce customer satisfaction.Therefore, customer satisfaction is derived from a process evaluation where the customer compares the previous expectations of service recovery with his perceptions of service recovery [6].
So, the customers' previous expectation, that is what the customer believes should receive as compensation or behavior that he believes should be done during the recovery process, may influence satisfaction.On the other hand, some researchers believe that the "perceived performance" or the result of a product or service meets customer needs [12], and therefore, if the service is able to provide what the customer needs or his expectations partially fulfilled, He was satisfied with the service provided or recovery performed.

Perceived Justice
It seems the justice that the customer perceives during service recovery process is an important factor in complainthandling satisfaction.So this component is also included in the proposed model as a sub-component of the cognitive evaluations.Four dimensions of justice (distributive, procedural, interactional and informational) have been studied in the form of "perceived justice".In this section, the definitions of the concept of justice and then its aspects are described in detail.
Researches have shown that customers evaluate the level of justice in service recovery process and the perception of justice can impact on their satisfaction [2,11,13].It can be said that customer complaints is due to perceived injustice, that is caused by an imbalance in the relationship between the customer and the service provider which makes that customers can expect from their service provider to compensate this imbalance in a correct way [14].In addition, customers do judgments about the fairness of the recovery process and these judgments affect their satisfaction [15].

Distributive Justice
Distributive justice refers to the perception of fairness in the distribution and allocation of resources and rewards.Generally, people assess the fairness of the results with respect to a reference standard [16].For this reason, the allocation can be judged against the results of specific allocation rules.Special attention has been focused on three rules of distributive justice: 1) equality -every member of the community to get the same results; 2) Need -the neediest one receives the highest compensation; and 3) fairness -fair compensation based on the contribution made by each person [17].In the services area, distributive justice is the customer's perception of equity in resource allocation and tangible results of service encounter (What a company offers to customers in order to compensate the service failure) [18,19].
Taylor's study [20] shows that there is a high correlation coefficient between distributive justice and satisfaction [21].Organizational researches on distributive fairness suggest that individuals' Perception of fairness affects attitudes and behaviors (such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, performance and retention in the organization) [22].

Procedural Justice
In the area of services, procedural justice is perceived fairness of procedures and policies involved in the recovery process and there is evidence that procedural justice impact the results of service recovery [2].Procedural justice is also the customer's perception of "equality" in the policies and procedures adopted by the company in the recovery process which resulted in achieved results [18].

Interactional Justice
It was said that individual's judgment about justice is on the basis of the results they obtain or procedures that they deal with.However, people educe justice from interpersonal relationship they have which is known as "interactional justice".Interactional justice is related to customer perception of "equality" in personal behaviors such as respect, honesty, dignity and the Guidelines he/she receives from organization [2].According to Smith et al. [11] the perception includes elements such as courtesy, honesty, willingness to perform justice and perceived endeavor by the customer that are compatible with the existing literature on service recovery [11,13].

Informational Justice
Informational Justice refers to adequacy and sincerity of information that explain the reasons for service failure [23].This dimension of justice focuses on explanations and justifications that are related to decisions and the reasons behind the events [3].Unlike other aspects of justice, informational justice becomes important after the failure in service delivery.A customer's perception of justice is threatened by the lack of information provided in a certain style [24].To provide information relevant to the decision results in increased individual's perception of justice.Informational Justice has been relatively neglected in services marketing literature and just in recent years considerations have been made in this regard.For example Mattila and Cranage [25] applied informational justice after the service failure and concluded that a giving a conscious choice to customers in a service area (e.g.information about service providing system in company) results in improved customer perception of informational justice following a service failure [24].In other words, providing information about the possible failure of the system to provide such service should have a positive impact on customer perceptions.

Affective Responses
Some research studies [26,27,28] has shown that the amount and type of processed information which clients are involved in a service, vary based on their emotional responses that it in turn affects their evaluations.So it seems that customer satisfaction is influenced by their emotional responses to service failure and depending on their emotional state, customer may represent different emotional responses to different types of recovery efforts (such as compensation, apology, etc.).Bagozzi et al. [29] say that affects typically have a particular stimulus (For example, a customer may be angry of poor services of a restaurant).They consider "affects" as a general group of subjective emotional processes that includes emotions, moods, and (probably) attitudes.In this paper we examine the emotions and feelings that emanate from a specific stimulus (i.e., the service failure).Service failures usually cause strong emotional response in customers.Previous research has shown that consumers' affective responses to service failure (such as feelings of anger, resentment and frustration) impact on their evaluations of services.

Research Methodology 4.
The study lies in the category of applied research in terms of purpose and descriptive research in terms of method.The research population consists of all customers of both Parsian Bank and Tejarat bank branches in Tehran who experienced at least one service failure and has complained during the research period.The sample size calculated as 246 customers.Sampling method was Multi-level cluster sampling.First, from among the 22 municipality districts of Tehran, seven branches were selected randomly and then sampling continued randomly in the seven branches so that a branch of the Tejarat Bank and a branch of the Parsian Bank were selected in each municipality district (totally 14 branches).Finally, a questionnaire was distributed among the customers of branches randomly.The library consists of books, articles, journals, research reports, papers and documents were used to prepare the literature and a closed questionnaire on the standard scale (reliability and validity) was used to collect data.Collection was conducted in person directly, so the return rate of questionnaires for this study was 100%.
To obtain validity, the test items were examined using the feedbacks and guidance of tutors and advisers.According to some experts, the test was revised and its ambiguities resolved which indicates face and content validity of the questionnaire.Given that the general framework of the research questionnaire was designed based on the model of Varela-Neira et al. [30], some modifications were made in items because of cultural differences.To determine the reliability of the questionnaire, Cronbach's Alpha test ( = 0.83) were used.Descriptive statistics was used to describe the status of examinees.Kolmogrov-Smirnov's Test was used to determine if the data were normal.Pearson's correlation test and step-by-step regression was applied to investigate the significance of hypotheses.

Proposed Model
In the model, components such as service recovery expectations, perceived performance, perceived justice and disconfirmation of expectations is given in terms of "cognitive evaluations" as independent variable.In the component of "perceived justice", the four dimensions of distributive justice, interactional justice, procedural justice and informational justice have been studied which is one of the most comprehensive models from this point of view as in previous models, the three dimensions of justice has been studied.The components "positive emotions" and "negative emotions" is concluded in "emotional response" of customers."complaint-handling Satisfaction" is discussed as the only dependent variable of the model.Figure 1.shows the conceptual model used in this study.

Data Analysis
In order to analyze the data, statistical tests and techniques were applied.In the first part, descriptive statistics were used to describe the variation of the demographic characteristics of the respondents such as gender, age, marital status, education level, income level and bank account.In the second part, the statistical methods used to analyze and test the hypothesis.In addition, all statistical calculations and graphing are presented by software SPSS18 and Excel 2010.

Individual characteristics
Variables related to individual characteristics among customers of under review banks (sample) are as follows: 69 percent male and 31 percent female; in terms of educational level, 7.7 percent below diploma degree, 46.3 percent diploma degree, 37.8 percent bachelor degree, and 8.1 percent master degree or above.24 percent were single and 76 percent were married.

Statistical analysis of data
Kolmogorov-Smirnov's (KS) test was used to check the normality of data distribution.Given the table 1, the test results show that the data distribution is normal.

Test of hypotheses
Pearson correlation test was used to investigate the relationship between cognitive evaluations and customer complainthandling satisfaction, and stepwise regression analysis was used to predict the impact of each factor. 1 st main hypothesis: There is significant relationship between customers' cognitive evaluations and their complainthandling satisfaction.
According to Pearson correlation test and the results presented in the table 2, the sig = 0.001 and r = 0.373.Since the significance level is less than 0.05, so there is good reason to reject the null hypothesis.So we could conclude that there is significant relationship between customers' cognitive evaluations and their complaint-handling satisfaction.The table shows the results of the stepwise regression analysis in which customer satisfaction of the complaint-handling (criterion variable) predicted based on the input of each components of cognitive evaluation (predictor variables) at each step.Stepwise regression results show that the four components of disconfirmation of expectations, perceived justice, perceived performance, and recovery expectation as a predictor variables have the criteria to enter into final regression equation to explain the of customer satisfaction (variable criterion).Thus, in a first step the variable "disconfirmation of expectations" entered into the equation which 0.44 of customer satisfaction was predicted by this variable.In the second step, variables disconfirmation of expectations and perceived justice, entered into equation simultaneously and the contribution of each variable to predict positive emotions was obtained 0.42 and 0.33, respectively.The next steps are done similarly to the fifth step.Entering the positive emotions into the equation in 5th step, the contribution of cognitive evaluations to predict the customer satisfaction is moderated.So we can conclude that: 1. Positive emotions moderate the relation between perceived complaint-handling performance and the complaint-handling satisfaction.2. Positive emotions moderate the relationship between recovery expectation and the complaint-handling satisfaction.3. Positive emotions moderate the relationship between disconfirmation of expectations and the complainthandling satisfaction.4. Positive emotions moderate the relationship between perceived justice and the complaint-handling satisfaction.Sub-hypotheses 11 to 14 is examined using stepwise regression as shown in table 6.The table shows the results of the stepwise regression analysis in which customer satisfaction of the complaint-handling (criterion variable) predicted based on the input of each components of cognitive evaluation (predictor variables) at each step.Stepwise regression results show that the four components of disconfirmation of expectations, perceived justice, perceived complaint-handling performance, and recovery expectations as predictor variables have the criteria to enter into final regression equation to explain the of customer satisfaction (variable criterion).Thus, in a first step the variable "perceived complaint-handling performance" entered into the equation which 0.52 of customer satisfaction was predicted by this variable.In the second step, variables perceived complaint-handling performance and disconfirmation of expectations entered into equation simultaneously and the contribution of each variable to predict positive emotions was obtained 0.46 and 0.40, respectively.The next steps are done similarly to the fifth step.Entering the negative emotions into the equation in 5th step, the contribution of cognitive evaluations to predict the customer satisfaction is moderated.So we can conclude that: 1. Negative emotions moderate the relation between perceived complaint-handling performance and the complaint-handling satisfaction.2. Negative emotions moderate the relationship between recovery expectation and the complaint-handling satisfaction.3. Negative emotions moderate the relationship between disconfirmation of expectations and the complainthandling satisfaction.4. Negative emotions moderate the relationship between perceived justice and the complaint-handling satisfaction.

Fitness test of the model
After estimating the parameters of the model, the question that arises is to what extent the model is consistent with the data?To assess the overall fit of the model study, we used LISREL software that the outputs are as table 7.As can be seen in Table 7, all indices of fitting, except Standardized RMR are at acceptable area which indicates an acceptable fit and proper adjustment of the research model with collected data.

5.
As the results showed, all the hypotheses of the study, except for the third sub-hypothesis (the relationship between complaint-handling satisfaction and service recovery expectation) were confirmed.The third sub-hypothesis suggests that there isn't significant relationship between complaint-handling satisfaction and service recovery expectation.This finding is contrary to the findings of Varela-Neira et al, [30] in which the impact of customer complaint-handling satisfaction with service recovery expectation has been confirmed.It seems that the expectations of the population somehow are not compatible with available facts.The studied banks failed to portray a realistic picture and were disable to adjust customer expectations with their skills and abilities.In fact, they have made unrealistic expectations on their clients and have not been able to meet these needs.In such service environments, efficient management of complaints is important to achieve higher levels of customer satisfaction.Perceived justice in service recovery, especially procedural and informational justice is critical because of its positive relationships with complaint-handling satisfaction.So, banks are required to train their employees to carefully explain the cause of the failure to the client and give answer to them skillfully.
Banks should also consider distributive and interactional justice and adopt appropriate compensation strategies.Solving customer problems with maintaining such a polite and tactful will increase the customer satisfaction with complaint-handling.
Because of the importance of disconfirmation of expectations, the banks shall strive to act beyond the customers' expectations.For this purpose, in addition to the service recovery process needs to be done, the bank must ensure that the service recovery corresponded with customer expectations.As a result, communication and image that bank offers shall be so that despite the positive expectations of the customer, it prevents the unrealistic expectations.
In general, bank management should adopt a customer-oriented strategy to provide flawless services so that the importance of achieving a satisfactory recovery process to be transferred to all staff.

Table 1 :
The results of KS test

Table 2 .
Correlation between cognitive evaluations and complaint-handling satisfaction (Pearson's correlation test results)There is significant relationship between customers' affective responses experienced in service recovery and their complaint-handling satisfaction.

Table 6 :
The moderator role of negative emotions in relationship between cognitive evaluations and complaint-handling satisfaction

Table 7 :
Fitness assessment index of the model