A Study In Business-to-Business Complaining Behavior: Yellow Pages Advertisers

Abstract

Complaining behavior between business suppliers and customers tends to emphasize somewhat different facets than the well-explored retail customer-to-business dynamic. In the telephone directory publishing business, advertiser-publisher relationships often persist over multiple, well-defined buying periods, and generally exist on a person-to-person basis at some level of intimacy. Advertiser perceptions of this relationship, and their reporting of complaint episodes, are explored through an extensive point-in-time survey of advertisers. Additionally, by following the behaviors of a cohort of 86,000 Yellow Pages advertisers for the first seven years of their relationship with their publisher, this paper points out modifications needed to the classic consumer complaining models, and also quantifies some of the relationships indicated by those models. Among other results, evidence is found for the form in which the action of complaining alters triggers for complaining in subsequent years, and how patterns of complaints over time affect churn probabilities.