What Drives Successful Complaint Resolutions on Social Media?: Evidence from the Airline Industry

Several companies effectively manage customer complaints on social media today, interacting with their customers on a real time basis. To study this increasingly popular practice, we examine brands’ complaint resolution efforts on social media, by exploiting a unique dataset of complaint-based customer interactions on Twitter, with a major airline. We find that complaining customers with a higher number of followers are more likely to be satisfied about their social media interaction with the brand. Moreover, the customers having an outcome related complaint, rather than a process related complaint, and also the customers who do not experience handoffs during the conversation, are more likely to be satisfied about their complaining experience on social media. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to empirically investigate the potential drivers of successful complaint resolutions in the context of social media customer service.