The intercultural validity of customer-complaint handling routines

Handbooks and consultants offer guidelines for customer-complaint reception which seem quite uniform across cultures. But one would expect different behavior patterns in different cultures. This paper describes a pilot investigation of this paradox. Four complaint-handling dialogues exhibiting different levels and types of politeness were written and shown to business students of various European nationalities, predominantly Danish and Spanish. The results showed that the Danes were much less tolerant of polite phrases and promotional language than the Spaniards, but that there was a ’concise, brief, sincere’ style acceptable to all cultural-national groups.