Time matters: Investigating the asymmetric reflection of online reviews on customer satisfaction and recommendation across temporal lenses

Abstract

Online platforms’ growth further facilitates the increasing popularity and business value of online reviews. This study investigates the key elements of online reviews and their relationships to customer satisfaction and online recommendation. Our findings from Skytrax suggest that the review textual comments of each product attribute have a positive direct effect on customer rating of the corresponding attribute and a positive spillover effect on other attribute ratings. Additionally, comments and attribute ratings have different magnitudes in reflecting customer overall satisfaction and online recommendation. Such asymmetric reflection varies across three-level hierarchical temporal lenses, including the COVID-19 pandemic (macro-institutional level), customer waiting time resulted from service failures (meso-organizational level), and the temporal contiguity between the customer consumption time and review posting time (micro-individual level). The three-level hierarchical temporal lenses negatively moderate the reflection of attribute-level ratings and comments on customer overall satisfaction but positively moderate the reflection of attribute-level ratings and comments on customer recommendation. Our findings offer valuable insights for managers, helping them comprehend the significance of temporal lenses in shaping customer online review behavior and the asymmetric reflection of consumer perceptions and behaviors stemming from online reviews. Managers should take into account these temporal lenses when designing and implementing online review platforms and when delivering products and services in order to enhance the advantages of positive electronic word-of-mouth effects.