Effective Use of Systems Beyond the Firm’s Control: The Case of Online Review Systems

The world is changing, and companies are becoming more exposed to systems beyond their control. Nowadays, hotels and restaurants main communication channels are online review platforms (e.g., TripAdvisor, Yelp), newspapers share news on social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter) and merchants compete on shopping comparisons websites (e.g., Google Shopping, Nextag). Online reviews systems are the starting point of customers’ research, social media are the medium to acquire news and information and shopping comparisons websites are the place that helps consumers to decide where and when to make the next purchase. In 2017, TripAdvisor reported a portfolio of 1.9 million accommodations and 4.3 million restaurants listed (TripAdvisor 2017). 67% of U.S. adults stated that they access news from social media (Pew Research Center 2017) and more than 30 million people access Nextag every month (Nextag 2018). These numbers show how these systems are intensively used by consumers and companies every day. The majority of small and medium companies use these systems to compete online, but they have no control over them. We define systems beyond firms’ control as any information systems neither designed or commissioned by a company, that the firm must use to compete (Lui et al. 2018). While these systems are imposed from the outside they can’t be neglected. Not being listed on Trip Advisor, Nextag or on Facebook translates to scarce visibility compared to competitors. For example, online review systems are superimposed on hotels. Hotels have no power on how reviews are organized, what elements of the hotels are evaluated or on how they can respond to customer’s reviews. Systems beyond the firm’s control are surprisingly understudied in the Information Systems literature (Lui et al. 2018), despite their importance and increasing prevalence. According to effective use theory, the ability of a firm to effectively use IS can result in performance improvements (Burton-Jones and Grange 2013). In this paper, we will narrow the focus of the study to only one type of these systems, online reviews systems. Previous researchers defined an online review system as “an IT-enabled customer service systems that because of the reach capability of information technology has the characteristics of a broadcast communication medium” (Lui et al. 2018). We define it as the socio-technical artefact that enable and virtualize the communication between customers and the companies. Where the online reviews represent the message, the customers send to the hotels, and the managerial response constitutes the companies’ answer. IS researchers studied the online reviews effect on trust, helpfulness, customer perception, consumer decision process, and customer service measurement among the others. While the message component attracted the majority of attention up to now, recent studies started to focus also on hotels’ responses impact on trust (Sparks et al. 2016) and performance (Lui et al. 2018). Studies also focused on the design of online review systems features and their impact on current and future customers (Jiang and Guo 2015). But what happens when the design is not under companies control? In an online review system, hotels are only empowered to provide a textual answer to a customer’s feedback. We argue that since hotels are not involved in the designing and building of the online review information system they can only adapt to it. Yet, an effective use of the communication channel is critical for hotel managers to enhance hotel performance (Lui et al. 2018). Therefore, our research question is: