Comparing the Diffusion of Online Service Recovery in Small and Large Organizations

Abstract

A key concern organizations face is how to incorporate Internet tools into their marketing communications mix. Where and how should companies invest their human, technological, and financial resources? This paper explores a subset of this problem, online complaining and electronic customer service. It applies diffusion of innovation as a theoretical framework to investigate organizational implementation of email technology and explain the outcome of annual customer service surveys in 2001, 2002, and 2003. The results add to the small body of research on electronic service recovery by extending diffusion of innovations to email service recovery and underscoring the importance of adoption phases, particularly for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Larger companies provide more channels for submitting complaints, which represents an early phase of adoption. There was little difference in how large and small companies respond to online complaints, a later phase of adoption.

Keywords:

• Electronic customer service
• SMEs
• service recovery
• electronic mail
• diffusion of innovations