RELIGIOSITY AND INTENTION TO COMPLAIN: A CASE OF RELIGIOUS SERVICE CONSUMPTION

Abstract

Service organizations always do their best to provide an excellent service to their customers. Despite the importance of ensuring that service failure does not occur, however, service failure sometimes is envitable and still occurs during the service encounter stage or service consumption. Since religious service provider is one of the service that has a high contact with the user also experience service failure that may drive consumer to complain. As there are only few studies have addressed service failure especially in the context of religious service consumption, therefore the aims of this research are to examine and provide some insights into factors that may drive intention to complain in service organization, particularly the provider of religious travel services for Hajj and Umrah. Using judgmental and snowball sampling, the data was collected from Muslim respondents who completed a survey which included measures of religiosity, service failure severity, forgiveness and intention to complain.Partial least square was used to test the four hypotheses. Religiosity was not found to influence intention to forgive the service provider in the event of service failure. On the other hand, severity of service failure was shown to influence intention to forgive the service provider. The findings provide insights to religious service providers to improve their service delivery and avoid the negative impacts of service failures.