Social media is rife with angry customers venting their grievances about brands and companies. According to the latest Customer Rage Study, completed in February 2020, the number of customers who prefer to register complaints via digital platforms rather than by phone or in-person has tripled over the past three years. The study also found that 48% of consumers in the U.S. rely on social media to gauge other people’s experiences with products and services.
What should worry companies is that less than one-third of the respondents indicated being satisfied with service recoveries and two-thirds expressed anger after a failure. The anonymity provided by social media has boosted expressions of anger and many firms struggle to offer effective responses to dissatisfied customers. Failing to de-escalate anger may be a critical reason that many companies fail in their recovery attempts.
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Two Effective Strategies
In a new Journal of Marketing study, we show how to de-escalate customers’ anger. Although recent research indicates that firms should address public complaints to limit the detrimental effects on other customers, it is unclear which response strategies are best suited to de-escalate angry customers and evoke a feeling of gratitude in the person making the complaint on social media. Using natural language processing on real social media complaints and in controlled experiments, we find two effective response strategies that firms could adopt to de-escalate negative arousal and enhance costumer gratitude in social media: active listening and empathy.
- Active listening implies paying attention to customers’ complaints and following up by demonstrating that attention through actions such as repeating, paraphrasing, or adapting the language to the customer.
- Empathy involves connecting at an emotional level with complaining customers by indicating understanding of their feelings with explicit expressions of validation and affirmation.
In a text-based context, active listening concerns the style of the response (i.e., linguistic style matching) and empathy is related to the content of the response (i.e., using empathetic words).
When dealing with highly aroused consumers on social media, increasing active listening and empathy in a firm’s response evokes gratitude, even if the actual failure is not yet recovered. Data from our three field studies show that increasing active listening by 1% increases the probability of customer gratitude by up to 14% and increasing empathy by 1% increases the probability of customer gratitude by up to 90%. Thus, compared to active listening, empathy is a stronger lever to enhance desired outcomes.
Changing the Way Companies Deal With Angry Customers
Our findings offer easy-to-implement implications that will help for-profit firms, nonprofit organizations, and governmental agencies that handle complaints via social media. Since social media interactions are often driven by high arousal and negative emotions, we hope our findings not only change the way companies deal with angry customers, but also make interaction partners more receptive to each other’s perspective and have better social media conversations.
While past research often focused on how companies could resolve customers’ problems and our research explores methods to de-escalate anger, a combination of both is a potential direction for future research. Sometimes it might be warranted to first solve the problem and then de-escalate the negative high arousal emotions, while at other times it might be best to prioritize de-escalation. We urge researchers to explore complaint handling and service recoveries in private text-based service chats where a one-on-one interaction between employees and customers takes place; in other words, in situations that offer more possibilities for de-escalation and relationship building.
From: Dennis Herhausen, Lauren Grewal, Krista Hill Cummings, Anne L. Roggeveen, Francisco Villarroel Ordenes, and Dhruv Grewal, “Complaint De-escalation Strategies on Social Media,” Journal of Marketing.
Go to the Journal of Marketing
Dennis Herhausen is Associate Professor of Marketing, KEDGE Business School, France.
Lauren Grewal is Assistant Professor of Business Administration, Dartmouth College, USA.
Krista Hill Cummings is Assistant Professor, Babson College, USA.
Anne L. Roggeveen is Charles Clarke Reynolds Professor of Retailing & Marketing, Babson College, USA.
Francisco Villarroel Ordenes is Assistant Professor of Marketing, LUISS University, Italy.
Dhruv Grewal is Toyota Chair of Commerce and Electronic Business and Professor of Marketing, Babson College, USA.