Abstract
Online consumer complaints are closely related to business reputation and elicit managers’ persistent efforts. However, service providers in the sharing economy (SE) lack the skills to communicate with consumers because most are informal or nonprofessional property owners. This research aims to examine the relationship between service providers’ responses and prospective consumers’ perceived helpfulness in the SE by using bed and breakfasts (B&B) as the sample. Response length and voice are adopted to measure the content quality of B&B’s response to an online complaint. Three types of voices (defensive, formalistic, and accommodative) are identified by analyzing service providers’ responses to negative reviews, among which the accommodative voice with empathic statements is the most effective. An inverted-U curve relationship between response length and helpfulness votes is verified based on cognitive load theory. Moreover, interactive effects between response length, review length, and images are also examined. This study suggests the investigation of online reviews from comprehensive perspectives, as well as the adoption of personalized strategies by SE practitioners to respond to consumer complaints.
Highlights
Word of mouth (WOM) can facilitate consumers’ purchase decision processes by reducing their perceived uncertainties and risks [1,2,3]
The presence and the speed of business responses to negative electronic WOM (eWOM) can be the cues to evaluate how the service provider cares for their consumer, whereas the information and empathic statements in the responses can be regarded as the argument strength
This research presents a brief review of online reviews and managerial responses, which have been extensively studied in other areas, to examine how this influencing mechanism works in the sharing economy (SE)
Summary
Word of mouth (WOM) can facilitate consumers’ purchase decision processes by reducing their perceived uncertainties and risks [1,2,3]. As a means to manage online reputation, managerial response to online reviews has yet been discussed in the SE context This response has been examined to significantly influence hotel rankings, sales, and consumers’ intentions to write reviews in the hotel service literature [27]. For negative reviews, the source of the response (the general manager or guest service agent), the voice of the responder (professional or conversational human voice), and the speed of the response (fast, moderate, or slow) will lead to different consumer inferences about hotels’ customer concern and trustfulness which may, in turn, influence their purchase intention [12]. Prior studies proposed some effective approaches for responding to negative reviews based on different attributes of managerial response in the hotel service context in which managers or customer service personnel generally have been equipped with the knowledge for managing consumer’s complaints. Implications and suggestions for practice will be generated based on the research findings
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