Adaptive Service Recovery Strategies on Twitter

Introduction

Understanding online complaints handling when negative service encounters occur plays an increasing role for management to address since consumers expect prompt responses and service recover from the service provider (Fan & Hong, 2016; Phillips-Melancon & Vassilis, 2018). With the rise of social media (SM) Abney, Pelletier, Ford and Horky in their article ‘#IHateYourBrand: adaptive service recovery strategies on Twitter’ (2017) aims to highlight the importance of SM platforms, in particular Twitter, for service failure recovery use for firms. Whilst SM platforms are popular for positive customer engagement and interaction, it also represents a challenge for companies as unsatisfied consumers can communicate their complaints publically (Fan & Hong, 2016). Therefore, the authors explore how firms can leverage the impact of adaptive service recovery strategies on customer evaluations and behavioural intentions via Twitter. The study builds on the issue that through the ease of using SM channels customer service is now exposed in real time to a broad audience. Given the medium’s viral nature, firms are unable to control the content customers produce throughout those platforms (Ye & Tripathi, 2016).

While the authors cited scholars who have explored consumer communication on SM and how it potentially impact overall brand performance, they indicate that these studies lack an understanding of how customers evaluate service recovery actions taken by the organisation. In contrast, Abney et al. (2017) tested a scenario in which the service provider delivered the wrong pizza. The respondent then sent out a complaint on Twitter, which may be direct (incorporating the @ symbol) or indirect (through the use of hashtags (#) or keyword phrases). The service recovery responses of the firm have been categorised in highly adaptive, low adaptive, indirect, or no-response. When analysing complaint tweets, the articles theoretical framework draws upon justice theory as it has been well applied to explain complaint behaviour in previous studies (Sugathan, Rossmann, & Ranjan, 2018; Ye & Tripathi, 2016). However, the authors predominantly focus on interactional justice component and consumer perceptions of adaptive service recoveries.

This study is significant as it aims to gain further insights into customer-firm complaint handling on SM in a service recovery context. The results indicate that consumers perceive a positive difference in highly personalised responses in contract to less directed messages. Nevertheless, the authors did not integrate other relevant variables such as anger, emotions or brand loyalty. In addition, procedural and distributive justice are also relevant dimensions when trying to explain and understand consumer’s reaction in conflict situations.

Further Discussion

SM plays an increasingly important part