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EXPRESS: Complaint Deescalation Strategies on Social Media

Existing literature offers multiple suggestions for how to recover from service failures, though without explicitly addressing customers’ negative, high arousal states, evoked by the failure. The few studies that address ways to improve negative emotions after failures focus on face-to-face interactions only. Because most customers today prefer social media complaining, firms must learn how to effectively deescalate 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.