Flogging in blogs: what drives customers to vent their complaint experiences online?

This research refers to dissatisfied consumers posting negative complaints on blogs as “flogging”. It qualitatively content analyses the complaints flogged on a non-commercial website, and highlights all complaint channel breakdowns as experienced by both offline and online shoppers. The “open and axial coding” technique with no a priori categories is initially used and followed by “focused coding” where more data are analysed to further refine the categorization and definition of themes. The underlying themes or types of complaint channel failures obtained shed understanding on existing problems faced by consumers with regards to complaint handling management.

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