Abstract
The number of social media posts that expose company integrity violations has increased dramatically. In response, some companies empower employees to respond to customer blogs, which requires employees to recognize the customer's perspective. We show that attentional bias modification can be used to prime employees of two global Fortune 100 companies with a self-sufficiency or empathy bias. The results indicate that narrative transportation, or the extent to which employees mentally enter the world evoked by a customer's story, mediates the effect of attentional bias on two relevant psychological ownership dimensions: acknowledgment of responsibility and willingness to respond. Participants with a self-sufficiency bias neither acknowledge responsibility nor want to respond. However, participants primed with an empathy bias take responsibility for the customer's case and respond to the integrity violation. We find evidence for two boundary conditions of this effect: (1) it strengthens when the employee perceives the customer's financial vulnerability as high and (2) it weakens when the customer is impolite in the blog post.
Highlights
As social media proliferate, such that markets get defined as conversations (Searls and Weinberger 2009), the impact of public opinion changes
We propose that reading customer accounts of integrity violations on blogs might cause employees to be transported into the customers’ perspective, causing them to feel a sense of ownership or obligation to deal with the problem at hand
Research on Attentional Bias Modification (ABM) has been targeted at alcohol addiction (Wiers et al 2011) and anxiety disorders (Amir et al 2009). We extend this emerging research stream by applying ABM to create an empathy bias for a customer’s perspective so as to make employees acknowledge responsibility and display willingness to respond; an effect mediated by transportation into the customer’s narrative on blogs
Summary
As social media proliferate, such that markets get defined as conversations (Searls and Weinberger 2009), the impact of public opinion changes. An increasing number of organizations, including British Telecom, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, SAP, TNT, Zappos, and even the U.S Army, empower employees to respond personally to social media messages. In so doing, they must ensure that employees respond appropriately by putting themselves in the customer’s shoes before issuing their responses to concerns voiced on blogs. A recent marketing decision maker survey (SAS 2009) identifies a demand for mental triggers that can drive employees to adopt a mindset in which they assume ownership of events that prompt customer complaints in blogs and thereby offer a response that is more likely to restore customer trust
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