In recent years, managing customer sentiment—particularly on social media—has become crucial as more customers use social media to seek help from firms. Therefore, we strive to determine an optimal strategy to manage customer sentiment on social media sites such as Twitter. We also aim to identify factors and external events that can influence the effectiveness of customer care. To understand the antecedents of digital customer care, we model a diffusion process of customer sentiment over time. This diffusion process is influenced (or controlled) by the firm through the strategy employed to respond to customer tweets. We then use real data consisting of sentiments expressed by customers directed at Twitter’s service accounts of four major U.S. telecommunication-service providers (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile) to estimate the parameters in our analytical model and shed several insights into digital customer care in this industry. First, we find a clear separation among the firms in terms of digital customer care effectiveness. Second, we find that good customer care is not merely a matter of responding to customer tweets. Third, the quality of digital customer care that customers expect varies across firms: Customers of higher priced firms (e.g., Verizon and AT&T) expect better customer care. Fourth, seemingly unrelated events (such as signing an exclusive contract with a celebrity) can impact digital customer care. Our study has important implications for managers as it can help firms determine the optimal strategy to influence customer sentiment.

中文翻译：

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客户的声音：在Twitter中管理客户服务

近年来，随着越来越多的客户使用社交媒体寻求公司的帮助，管理客户情绪（尤其是在社交媒体上）已变得至关重要。因此，我们努力确定一种最佳策略来管理社交媒体网站（例如Twitter）上的客户情绪。我们还旨在确定可能影响客户服务有效性的因素和外部事件。为了了解数字客户服务的前提，我们对客户情绪随时间的扩散过程进行了建模。公司通过响应客户推文的策略来影响（或控制）这种扩散过程。然后，我们使用真实数据，其中包含由客户表达的针对四家美国主要电信服务提供商（AT＆T，Verizon，Sprint，和T-Mobile）来估算我们的分析模型中的参数，并对该行业的数字客户服务提供一些见解。首先，我们发现在数字客户服务有效性方面，两家公司之间存在明显的隔separation。其次，我们发现良好的客户服务不仅仅是回应客户的推文。第三，客户期望的数字客户服务质量因公司而异：价格较高的公司（例如Verizon和AT＆T）的客户期望更好的客户服务。第四，看似无关的事件（例如与名人签订独家合同）可能会影响数字客户服务。我们的研究对管理人员具有重要意义，因为它可以帮助公司确定影响客户情绪的最佳策略。