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Responding to Customer Reviews: Do Managerial Responses Enhance Review Quality?

Khreiche, André (2020) Responding to Customer Reviews: Do Managerial Responses Enhance Review Quality?

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Abstract:Online customer reviews have become an instrumental source of information for customers in guiding their purchasing process. Similarly, firms have embraced online reviews as a channel for marketing, customer care and public relations management. Many reviewing platforms, such as TripAdvisor or Trustpilot, offer organizations the option to reply to reviews of their customers. However, the degree to which this feature is used by companies varies greatly. I investigate whether higher response frequency, higher response speed and higher response length, are effective in increasing the quality of online reviews on the review platform Trustpilot. By combining traditional review quality metrics with metrics based on natural language processing and machine learning techniques, this study employs a nuanced view of online review quality. The analysis reveals that higher response frequency is not effective in improving the quality of online reviews. Both, higher response speed and higher response length, on the other hand, are shown to improve the quality of online reviews. These findings bear implications for companies which engage in responding to customer reviews. Company representatives should be selective in deciding which reviews to respond to, rather than aiming to respond to as many reviews as possible during the time dedicated to this task. It is advisable to respond in a manner which best informs the potential audience of the conversation. This includes the individual who posted the review as well as other (potential) customers. Furthermore, the task of responding to customer reviews should be performed regularly and in short intervals, rather than waiting for reviews to accumulate and answering them in bulk, so that the time span between review and response can be minimized.
Item Type:Essay (Master)
Faculty:BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences
Subject:85 business administration, organizational science
Programme:Business Administration MSc (60644)
Link to this item:https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/81289
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