Abstract

In this study, we examine the effects of degree of personalization and formality on customers’ attitudes and behavioral intentions in complaint replies on social media. This study differs from previous research in examining less extreme manipulations of personalization and formality, and in operationalizing personalization in the shape of routinized and individualized answers to multiple posts. In two experimental studies, we test the impact of personalization and formality on customers’ satisfaction with how the complaint is handled, their perception of the customer service agent in terms of how well the agent treated them (perceived interactional justice) and to what extent the agent made efforts to have an engaging conversation with them (perceived conversational human voice), and on four semantic differentials (professional-unprofessional, fake-genuine, friendly-unfriendly and respectful-disrespectful). The results show a positive main effect of increased personalization and informality and clearly foreground the importance of individualized responses as the stronger effect. The results also support the Persuasion Knowledge Model in showing how informality may backfire in routinized responses, suggesting that informal but routinized language use triggers suspicion with customers that the company is trying to persuade and manipulate them.

摘要

在这项研究中，我们研究了个性化和形式化程度对社交媒体投诉回复中客户态度和行为意图的影响。这项研究与以前的研究不同，它研究了对个性化和形式化的较少极端操纵，并以对多个职位进行常规化和个性化回答的形式来实施个性化。在两项实验研究中，我们测试了个性化和形式化对客户对投诉处理方式，客户对客户服务代理商的满意度的满意度的影响（根据代理商对他们的对待程度（感知的互动公正））以及客户满意度的程度。特工努力与他们进行有趣的对话（感知的对话人类声音），并努力解决四个语义上的差异（专业-非专业，伪造的，友善的，不友善的和尊重的，不尊重的）。结果显示出增加的个性化和非正式性的积极主效应，并且清楚地表明了个性化响应作为更强效果的重要性。结果还支持说服知识模型，显示了非正式性可能如何在常规反应中产生适得其反的效果，这表明非正式但常规化的语言使用引起了客户对公司试图说服和操纵它们的怀疑。