Purpose

Service employees’ communication is a critical factor in employee-customer interaction, especially to achieve customer satisfaction during service failure and recovery (SFR). However, empirical knowledge regarding the impact of service employees’ communication on SFR effectiveness and SFR efficiency is still limited. To address this, the first research project within this cluster investigates SFR effectiveness and efficiency in the context of online employee-customer interaction. The second research project within this research cluster examines and reveals the dynamics of digital conversations between service employees and customers. Moreover, we investigate subjective and objective downstream consequences for the interaction partners, such as overall satisfaction or performance.

Approach

We use field data of thousands of messages written by service employees and customers and conduct automated text analysis. Moreover, we aim to utilize conversational dynamics models (e.g., Markov Chains).

Keywords

employee-customer interaction, communication, conversational dynamics, service failure, service recovery, text analysis

Involved Persons

Dr. Ellen Weber, Dr. Janina Garbas, Prof. Dr. Marion Büttgen, Prof. Dr. Kristof Coussement, Dr. Matthijs Meire