Mutual Disclosures and Content Intimacy in Customer Group Engagement: Evidence from Online Chat Groups

Abstract

Firm-hosted online chat groups (OCGs) are an emerging strategy for businesses to organize online activities and engage customers. It enables real-time conversations in a relatively private and anonymous environment. Our paper investigates the role of information disclosure in customer engagement in OCGs. Based on information disclosure theory, we disentangle two types of disclosures, self-disclosure and reverse-disclosure, which we refer to as mutual disclosures. We examine the effects of mutual disclosures from different OCG parties (i.e., focal customer, peer customers and brand managers) on focal customer’s subsequent engagement. Moreover, we examine the intimacy levels of disclosure content and explore the interplay of mutual disclosures regarding content intimacy consistency. Text mining techniques are employed to identify group conversations and measure content intimacy levels of personal disclosure messages. Our findings reveal that mutual disclosures between focal customers and their peers induce more subsequent engagement. Our findings uncover multifaceted influences from content intimacy consistency between mutual disclosures on customer engagement. The results of this paper extend our understanding of how personal information exchange in online group conversations affects user engagement. They also provide insights into the interactivities among group members and will help firms develop strategies for customer relationship management through OCGs.