[[alternative]]An Empirical Study Examing the Relationship among Personality, Non- Complaint Reasons and Expected Encouragement Strategies

[[abstract]]As eating-out customers increase rapidly, marketing plays an important role in the food and beverage industry. Nowadays, the focus of marketing has shifted to how to retain old customers from how to attract new ones. Heskett, Sasser and Hart (1989) pointed out that the cost of earning a new customer is five times of keeping an old one. It is, therefore, essential to explore effective ways in keeping the customers’ royalty. This research explored the relationship of the expected encouragement strategies in the restaurant to customer’s non-complaint reasons and personality. Costa & McCrae’s (1989) Big Five scheme was adopted to analyze and categorize the non-complaint customer’s personality characteristics. 217 samples were collected through convenience sampling method. The following statistical tests were adopted to analyze the data, Reliability Analysis, Descriptive statistics, Factor Analysis, GLM-Multivariate and Pearson Correlation with the SPSS 11.5 software. The study found the following. First, most of the non-complaint customers can be categorized as having negative style behavior and the first five reasons for them not to file complaints are not to spoil pleasure, to avoid making trouble, to avoid bothering other customers, to consider the difficulties the restaurant owners may encounter, and to avoid the inconvenience of complaining in front of the elders or the VIPs. Second, service failures have a significant relationship with the causes of non-complaint reasons and yet, no differences were observed between service failures and the expected encouragement strategies. Third, only Agreeableness customer personality has significant correlation with the causes of non-complaint reasons that are categorized as negative style behavior. Fourth, the relationship between the customers’ personality and the expected encouragement, either active or passive, is significantly correlated. Finally, the non-complaint customers who posses the negative style behavior personality significantly expected active encouragement strategies from the restaurant. The results of this study could assist the restaurant owners to understand the reasons for the customers not to file complaints and accordingly, to be better able to provide different encouragement strategies in a proper way. The reported findings can also help the restaurant owners to establish and maintain a good relationship with their customers, which can further enhance the loyalty of the customers and build up their own reputation in the field.