Location
260-051, Owen G. Glenn Building
Start Date
12-15-2014
Description
Many companies are now providing customer service through social media, helping and engaging their customers on a real-time basis. To study this increasingly popular practice, we examine how major airlines respond to customer comments on Twitter by exploiting a large data set containing Twitter exchanges between customers and three major airlines in North America. We find that these airlines pay significantly more attention to Twitter users with more followers, suggesting that companies literarily discriminate customers based on their social influence. Moreover, our findings suggest that companies in the digital age are increasingly more sensitive to the need to answer both customer complaints and customer compliments while the actual time-to-response depends on customer’s social influence and sentiment as well as the firm’s social media strategy.
Recommended Citation
Gunarathne, Priyanga; Rui, Huaxia; and Seidmann, Avi, "Customer Service on Social Media: The Effect of Customer Popularity and Sentiment on Airline Response" (2014). ICIS 2014 Proceedings. 9.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2014/proceedings/SocialMedia/9
Customer Service on Social Media: The Effect of Customer Popularity and Sentiment on Airline Response
260-051, Owen G. Glenn Building
Many companies are now providing customer service through social media, helping and engaging their customers on a real-time basis. To study this increasingly popular practice, we examine how major airlines respond to customer comments on Twitter by exploiting a large data set containing Twitter exchanges between customers and three major airlines in North America. We find that these airlines pay significantly more attention to Twitter users with more followers, suggesting that companies literarily discriminate customers based on their social influence. Moreover, our findings suggest that companies in the digital age are increasingly more sensitive to the need to answer both customer complaints and customer compliments while the actual time-to-response depends on customer’s social influence and sentiment as well as the firm’s social media strategy.