How potential customers perceive companies’ reply to negative reviews?

ABSTRACT

Companies are increasingly using humorous replies as a service recovery method to respond and apologize to complainants. However, there is a lack of clarity regarding the effectiveness and appropriateness of humorous replies. Drawing on information processing theory, this study assesses how consumers as onlookers view former customers’ negative word-of-mouth relating to service failures (vindictive and nonvindictive reviews) and humorous and standard replies provided by service operators in the context of hostels, and effects on booking intentions. To compare consumers’ responses to various combinations of reviews and replies, this study administered survey questionnaires to 377 respondents. A series of independent-sample t test analyses and partial least squares (PLS) path analyses revealed that standard replies are effective for responding to both review types. Humorous replies have better performance when responding to nonvindictive reviews than vindictive reviews. This study contributes to the scarce research on humorous replies in the service recovery context.

摘要

除了使用标准 (正式) 回复外，越来越多公司使用幽默的回复方式作为服务补救方法来回应投诉人并向投诉人道歉。然而，幽默回复的有效性和适当性仍不明确。此外，关于幽默在投诉管理和服务补救中的作用的研究也是不足的。本研究使用讯息处理理论，探讨作为旁观者的消费者如何看待与服务失误相关的之前客户的负面口碑 (报复性和非报复性评论的形式) 以及旅舍服务业者提供的幽默和标准回复。本研究也探讨评论和回复的诊断性以及对预订意愿的影响。为了比较旁观者的消费者对各种负面评论和回复组合的看法，本研究对 377 名受访者进行问卷调查。一系列的独立样本 t 检验、偏最小平方法路径分析和偏最小平方法多组分析显示标准回复对两种负面评论类型是有效。在回应非报复性评论时，幽默回复比回应报复性评论有更好的表现。因此，除了有助于增加仍然稀少的幽默回复在服务补救背景下相关的文献外，本研究提供了讯息处理理论适合分析本研究背景的实证支持，并增加了研究较少的口碑感知诊断性文献。本研究还提供了幽默回复在服务补救中的使用不是总是合适的并必须谨慎处理的实际义涵。虽然标准回复是合适的，但回复者必须避免回复激怒旁观者的消费者。

KEYWORDS:

• Negative word-of-mouth
• humorous reply
• standard reply
• diagnosticity
• intention
• hostel

关键词:

• 负面口碑、幽默回复、标准回复、诊断性、意愿、旅舍

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The reply is written in Chinese. As Chinese sense of humor and expressions are often different from Western sense of humor and expressions, we have provided the original Chinese text in the paper. In addition, the translation is expected to lose some of the humorous aspect present in the Chinese reply. For example, ‘哈囉哈囉’ (hello hello) and ‘talk talk’ are Taiwanese endearing ways of saying hello and let’s talk (discuss). Similarly, instead of saying ‘來我們的旅館住宿’ (come to my hostel to stay), the more humorous ‘來我們的旅館玩耍’ (coming to our hostel to play) is used. The word ‘der’ is a slang word used by young Taiwanese on social media, such as ptt, to express placing emphasis in a funny way. Hence, the der in ‘注意der’ (pay attention der) means emphasizing that the hostel will pay greater attention to a related matter. QQ is an emoticon for a set of crying eyes in Taiwan. Another example of the humor in the reply is the words ‘灰常重要’ (very important). Normally, it should be written as ‘非常重要’ but to be funny (not a grammatical error), ‘灰’ which sound the same as ‘非’ is used instead. Others are written in a lively and humorous manner, such as ‘把員工訓練得更好更厲害的’ (train our employees to be greater, better and more powerful) rather than the more formal ‘對員工進行加強訓練’ (strengthen the training program for our employees).

Additional information

Funding

This work was financially supported by the Intelligent Electronic Commerce Research Center from The Featured Areas Research Center Program within the framework of the Higher Education Sprout Project by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Taiwan.