Timeliness, transparency, and trust: A framework for managing online customer complaints

doi:10.1016/j.bushor.2018.01.007

Business Horizons

Volume 61, Issue 3, May–June 2018, Pages 375-384

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2018.01.007 Get rights and content

Abstract

This article discusses several practical solutions for dealing with online customer complaints. Online complaints are inevitable; how a firm responds can make the difference. There are techniques that managers can use not only to minimize the detrimental impact of online complaints, but also to produce beneficial outcomes. Herein, we introduce our 3T framework, designed to help managers and support teams respond to online complaints in a thoughtful and measured way. We build on word-of-mouth research and several theories from marketing, service marketing, journalism, and business ethics. With so many reviews posted online every second, firms must employ best practices grounded in empirical research and solid conceptualization to deal with this important component of online customer service.

Section snippets

Challenges of the digital complaint department

One thing that e-commerce and social media have taught us is that consumers are not shy about making their voices heard online. These voices take the form of online comments, product reviews, blog posts, and aggregated rankings. They can be shared on a multitude of platforms, including social media sites, corporate sponsored websites, and online review sites. Collectively, these communications are called electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM). eWOM is defined as “any positive or negative statement

The 3T framework of managing online customer complaints

Consumer complaints are no longer a private matter. Instead, upset consumers now take to public forums and social media to express dissatisfaction with a firm (Ward & Ostrom, 2006). Consumers can now spread negative WOM not just to their close network, but an almost infinite number of others. The increased power that consumers yield has changed the way a brand must develop and maintain its reputation since firms are no longer in total control of the posted message (Breazeale, 2009). Yet we

Final thoughts

As online retail channels continue to grow and brick-and-mortar businesses maintain strong online presences, managing online reviews and customer complaints becomes more important than ever. With nearly 30,000 reviews posted every minute on Yelp alone (Arkalgud & Partridge, 2017), online complaints are an inevitable consequence. Smart marketers recognize that any online review or complaint—no matter how negative—represents an excellent occasion to enhance customer loyalty and improve brand

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Fake reviews have become a pervasive problem in the realm of online commerce, affecting businesses and consumers alike. These fraudulent reviews can cause significant damage to the credibility of companies and negatively impact consumer welfare. While various platforms, such as Yelp and Amazon, have implemented measures to combat fake reviews, these efforts have been largely ineffective and, at times, even exacerbated the problem. As a result, on November 8, 2022, the Federal Trade Commission announced that it is soliciting input for possible regulations around ways to fight fake reviews. The growing sophistication of Artificial Intelligence—particularly generative AI technologies like ChatGPT—worsens the problem by enabling the production of human-like fake reviews at an unprecedented scale. This lends new urgency to the fake review problem, so it is imperative to examine the pros and cons of extant approaches and propose alternative approaches that are better equipped to tackle the issue. In this article, we introduce a novel approach using digital identity verification, which involves verifying a user’s identity via various forms of digital information that represent the individual and have not been applied to online reviews. We highlight the limitations of extant techniques and outline ways in which digital identity verification may be a promising solution to the problem of fake reviews. Potential benefits and challenges, as well as the effectiveness of our proposed approach in addressing the issue of fake reviews, are discussed.
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Citation Excerpt :
Future research may take religious values into consideration. Furthermore, response time and personalization may also contribute to the effectiveness of online complaint handling (Stevens et al., 2018). Future research is also encouraged to consider those effects in predicting customer forgiveness in an online environment.
This research investigates the impact of using emojis (i.e., the pleading-face emoji) on customer forgiveness in relation to handling complaints on social media. Specifically, this research proposes that perceived firm sincerity and perceived firm empathy play mediating roles in the relationship between emoji use and customer forgiveness. In addition, the research identifies the moderating role of communication style in the proposed relationship. Results of three experimental studies indicated that the presence of the emoji in online complaint handling leads to an increase in perceived firm sincerity, which in turn increases perceived firm empathy and, subsequently, leads to customer forgiveness. The serial mediation effects (use of emojis → perceived firm sincerity → perceived firm empathy → customer forgiveness) were moderated by the service provider’s communication style. Specifically, the serial mediation effect occurs when an informal communication style, but not a formal communication style, is used. Furthermore, no difference exists in the research findings across different service types (hedonic vs. utilitarian).
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In the current age of emerging technologies and big data, transparency has become an important issue for technology users and online consumers. However, there is a lack of consensus on what constitutes transparency across domains of research, not to mention transparency guidelines for designers and marketers. In this review, we explored the question of what transparency means in current research and practices by reviewing the literature in three domains: persuasive technology, immersive technology and online marketing. Literature reviewed, including both empirical research and position articles, covered multidisciplinary areas including computer science and information technology, psychology, healthcare, human computer interaction, business and management, law and public health. In this paper, we summarized our findings through a framework of transparency and provided insights into the different aspects of transparency, categorized into ten themes (i.e., Organizational Transparency, Information Transparency, Transparency of System Design, Data Privacy and Informed Consent, Transparency of Online Advertising, Potential Risks, User Autonomy, Informed Decision Making, Information Visualization, Personalization and User-centered design) along three dimensions (i.e., Types of transparency, Impact on User and Potential Solutions). Addressing aspects of transparency will facilitate users’ autonomy and contribute to their informed decision making.
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Apart from offline marketing, similar research results have been found for the online market. Prior studies have shown that the response voice has significant effects on potential consumers’ perceptions (Min et al., 2015; Kniesel et al., 2016) and behaviors (Liu and Ji, 2019; Crijns et al., 2017), especially in cases of complaints (Javornik et al., 2020; Stevens et al., 2018), negative reviews (Sparks et al., 2016), online storms (Herhausen et al., 2019), etc. When communicating with consumers, merchants choose different language styles to gain their brand trust in varying degrees (Jakic et al., 2017).
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View full text

Timeliness, transparency, and trust: A framework for managing online customer complaints

Abstract

Section snippets

Challenges of the digital complaint department

The 3T framework of managing online customer complaints

Final thoughts

International Journal of Research in Marketing

Intmar

Electronic Commerce Research and Applications

#IHATEYOURBRAND: Adaptive service recovery strategies on Twitter

Journal of Services Marketing

Codes of ethics as signals for ethical behavior

Journal of Business Ethics

The social influence of brand community: Evidence from European car clubs

Journal of Marketing

Customer satisfaction and word of mouth

Journal of Service Research

The problem with online ratings

MIT Sloan Management Review

Web True.0: Why the internet and digital ethnography hold the key to answering the questions that traditional research just can't

Role of product-related conversations in the diffusion of a new product

Journal of Marketing Research

An assessment of electronic word-of-mouth research

International Journal of Market Research

Local consumer review survey 2016: The impact of online reviews

Consumer-generated versus marketer-generated websites in consumer decision making

International Journal of Market Research

Teaching old brands new tricks: Retro branding and the revival of brand meaning

Journal of Marketing

The customer orientation of service workers: Personality trait effects on self-and supervisor performance ratings

Journal of Marketing Research

Game changer: Cone survey finds 4-out-of-5 consumers reverse purchase decisions based on negative online reviews

Customer perceptions of corporate responses to product complaints: The role of explanations

Academy of Management Journal

The bottom line impact of organizational responses to customer complaints

Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Research

Organizational responses to customer complaints: What works and what doesn’t

Journal of Service Research

Getting personal with computers: How to design personalities for agents

Applied Artificial Intelligence

Authenticity: What consumers really want