Service Recovery via Twitter: An Exploration of Responses to Consumer Complaints

Abstract

The online response to customer complaints (i.e., service recovery) is a central feature of modern organizations’ customer-focused performance management systems. Motivated by the lack of descriptive information related to complaint handling that can be used in assessing managerial performance, we collect organizations’ responses to consumer complaints via Twitter and apply Zemke and Schaaf’s (1990) traditional service recovery model to explore these. We collected 10,305 tweets that describe the use of Twitter for service recovery by organizations across four industries: airlines, casual dining chain restaurants, hotels, and fast-food restaurants. The findings show that in our sample, the traditional service recovery model with five service recovery elements (apology, urgent reinstatement, empathy, symbolic atonement, and follow-up) is implemented to various degrees. Further, we identify three additional service recovery elements not previously discussed by prior research: channel transfer, feedback acknowledgement, and information request. Our findings have research implications and highlight the importance of incorporating online customer complaints into the managerial performance systems.

Keywords: Service recovery, social media, Twitter, managerial performance systems

JEL Classification: M1, M31, M41, Z33