Testing the Various Guises of Conversational Human Voice: The Impact of Formality and Personalization on Customer Outcomes in Online Complaint Management

Abstract In this study, we examine the effects of degree of personalization and formality on customers’ attitudes and behavioral intentions in complaint replies on social media. This study differs from previous research in examining less extreme manipulations of personalization and formality, and in operationalizing personalization in the shape of routinized and individualized answers to multiple posts. In two experimental studies, we test the impact of personalization and formality on customers’ satisfaction with how the complaint is handled, their perception of the customer service agent in terms of how well the agent treated them (perceived interactional justice) and to what extent the agent made efforts to have an engaging conversation with them (perceived conversational human voice), and on four semantic differentials (professional-unprofessional, fake-genuine, friendly-unfriendly and respectful-disrespectful). The results show a positive main effect of increased personalization and informality and clearly foreground the importance of individualized responses as the stronger effect. The results also support the Persuasion Knowledge Model in showing how informality may backfire in routinized responses, suggesting that informal but routinized language use triggers suspicion with customers that the company is trying to persuade and manipulate them.