Handling online customer complaints and organizational competitiveness of online retail stores in Port Harcourt

Abstract

The study investigated the relationship between handling online customer complaints and organizational competitiveness of online retail firms in Port Harcourt. Port Harcourt residents of 2,500,000 people formed the population of the study and a sample size of 400 was arrived at with the help of Taro Yameni formula. The data used for the study were distributed and retrieved through a structured questionnaire. Three null hypotheses were tested using the spearman’s rank order correlation coefficient with the aid of SPSS version 23. From the findings of the study, it revealed that there is a positive and significant relationship between handling online customer complaints and organizational competitiveness. Specifically, the findings showed that handling online customer complaints via its dimensions of Responsiveness, Compensation and customer interaction positively correlates organizational competitiveness of online retail stores in Port Harcourt. In conclusion, it is noted that responsiveness, compensation and customer interaction of this online retail stores positively and significantly enhance and contributes to the organizational competitiveness of this firms. Hence, the study recommends that for online retail stores in Port Harcourt to gain competitive advantage in this fierce competitive marketplace, dedicated effort should be placed online complaint handling activities as these have strong positive relationship with organizational competitiveness; online retail stores should endeavor to get more recommendations from their customers continuously to know if their compensation tactics are effective and timely, as this was found to have the highest correlation with organizational competitiveness; online retail stores should pay special attention in handling any complaint and attempt to break the silence of dissatisfied customers.