Complaint De-Escalation Strategies on Social Media
研究通过实地实验和实验室实验发现，企业在社交媒体回复中增加积极倾听和共情，能缓解顾客的高唤醒负面情绪，即使问题未解决也能引发感激，有助于服务补救。
To date, the literature offers multiple suggestions for how to recover from service failures, albeit without explicitly addressing customers’ negative, high-arousal states evoked by the failure. The few studies that do address ways to improve negative emotions after failures focus on face-to-face interactions only. Because many customers today prefer to complain on social media, firms must learn how to effectively de-escalate negative, high-arousal emotions through text-based exchanges to achieve successful service recoveries. With three field studies using natural language processing tools and three preregistered controlled experiments, the current research identifies ways to mitigate negative arousal in text-based social media complaining, specifically, active listening and empathy. In detail, increasing active listening and empathy in the firm response evokes gratitude among customers in high-arousal states, even if the actual failure is not (yet) recovered. These findings provide a new theoretical perspective on the role of customer arousal in service failures and recoveries as well as managerially relevant implications for dealing with public social media complaints.