Willemijn van Dolen

An empirical assessment of the influence of customer emotions and contact employee performance on encounter and relationship satisfaction

Our study examines the effect of customer emotions and contact employee performance in creating encounter and relationship satisfaction. It investigates the performance of the contact employee from an interactive perspective by specifying the employee performance into employee-specific and interaction-induced behaviors, using a multilevel approach. Our results reveal a significant influence of positive emotions on both types of satisfaction and no significant impact of negative emotions. Furthermore, our study identifies that not all of the employee behaviors that influence encounter satisfaction also influence relationship satisfaction. Additionally, results of the study demonstrate that specifying employee performance into employee-specific and interaction-induced behaviors allows a better understanding of customer encounter and relationship satisfaction.

Online purchase intentions: A multi-channel store image perspective

The advantages of the bricks-and-clicks retail format in the battle for the online customer has been widely discussed but empirical research on it has been limited. We applied a multi-channel store image perspective to assess its influence on online purchase intentions. Drawing on a sample of 630 customers of a large music retail store in the Netherlands, the results demonstrated that offline and online store perceptions directly influenced online purchase intention. In addition, our findings confirmed that offline store impressions were used as references for their online store counterparts. Synergy and reference effects are discussed.

Affective consumer responses in service encounters: The emotional content in narratives of critical incidents

This research explores the effect of emotion on satisfaction with after sales services. Emotional content is derived from the respondents answers to the so-called critical incident question in order to classify the information according to established categories and the object responsible for evoking the emotional response. The emotional content is classified according to three levels of inclusiveness; the superordinate, the basic and the subordinate level. We found that the subordinate level is responsible for explaining most of the service satisfaction. Positive emotions like positive surprise, pleasure and contentment contribute positively to satisfaction, while negative emotions, such as irritation and disappointment have a negative influence. Furthermore, more intense emotions have a greater impact on customer satisfaction than less intense emotions. Irritation, especially, has an extraordinarily negative impact on customer satisfaction. The positive emotion categories contribute almost equally to satisfaction. While the service employee is mostly the object of positive emotions in the critical incidents, the product, albeit less often the object of emotion, mostly evokes negative emotions.

Virtual Customer Service Agents: Using Social Presence and Personalization to Shape Online Service Encounters

By performing tasks traditionally fulfilled by service personnel and having a humanlike appearance, virtual customer service agents bring classical service elements to the web, which may positively influence customer satisfaction through eliciting social responses and feelings of personalization. This paper sheds light on these dynamics by proposing and testing a model drawing upon the theories of implicit personality, social response, emotional contagion, and social interaction. The model proposes friendliness, expertise, and smile as determinants of social presence, personalization, and online service encounter satisfaction. An empirical study confirms the cross-channel applicability of friendliness and expertise as determinants of social presence and personalization. Overall, the study underlines that integration between technology and personal aspects may lead to more social online service encounters.

Micro-Level Interactions in Business-Nonprofit Partnerships

While most research on business–nonprofit partnerships has focused on macro and meso perspectives, this article pays attention to the micro level. Drawing on various theoretical perspectives from both marketing and management, this study conceptually relates the outcomes of active employee participation in such partnerships to consumer self-interest. This article also explores empirically whether and when self-interest affects consumers’ responses toward firms in relation to business–nonprofit partnerships. The study reveals that self-interest can directly influence consumers’ behavioral responses toward firms (i.e., switching and buying intentions, and word of mouth), whereas the impact on evaluative responses in terms of attitude and trust is only weak. The fit between the firm and the nonprofit partner (company–cause fit) turns out to moderate this effect, with consumer self-interest only playing a role if fit is high. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Multimodal Popularity Prediction of Brand-related Social Media Posts

Brand-related user posts on social networks are growing at a staggering rate, where users express their opinions about brands by sharing multimodal posts. However, while some posts become popular, others are ignored. In this paper, we present an approach for identifying what aspects of posts determine their popularity. We hypothesize that brand-related posts may be popular due to several cues related to factual information, sentiment, vividness and entertainment parameters about the brand. We call the ensemble of cues engagement parameters. In our approach, we propose to use these parameters for predicting brand-related user post popularity. Experiments on a collection of fast food brand-related user posts crawled from Instagram show that: visual and textual features are complementary in predicting the popularity of a post; predicting popularity using our proposed engagement parameters is more accurate than predicting popularity directly from visual and textual features; and our proposed approach makes it possible to understand what drives post popularity in general as well as isolate the brand specific drivers.

Consumer Perceptions of CSR: (How) Is China Different?

Despite large interest in CSR in China, the role of consumers has been underexplored in empirical research, with studies mainly focused on specific subcomponents of CSR, based on evidence from small, urban samples. Using a country-wide consumer survey, this article examines 1) how Chinese consumers perceive the underlying components of CSR found in Western countries; 2) whether their CSR expectations differ for local Chinese firms compared to foreign firms; and 3) whether results differ across regions. Findings show that the originally Western CSR construct seems generalizable to China, but consumers across all regions perceive two rather than four components: one combining economic and legal responsibilities (‘required CSR’) and another combining ethical and philanthropic responsibilities (‘expected CSR’). Consumers expect local Chinese firms to take more responsibility than foreign firms, particularly for required CSR. Only in a few regions were local and foreign firms expected to take similar levels of responsibility for some aspects. The article discusses possible explanations, future research areas, and implications for practice.

Role of local presence in online impulse buying

Perceptions of local presence increase when products are presented in a vivid and interactive manner in a web store.Perceptions of local presence increase the urge to buy impulsively through increased product affect.Although local presence reduces perceived product risk, product risk does not inhibit the urge to buy impulsively. This paper proposes and tests a model to explain how consumers perceptions of product presentation technologies may affect online impulse buying. Data from a laboratory experiment (N=212), which were analyzed using a structural equation modeling approach, showed that vividness and interactivity of online product presentations increased the participants perceptions of local presence, which refers to the sense of a product being present with a consumer in his or her own environment. Local presence, in turn, influenced the urge to buy impulsively by generating both cognitive (perceived risk) and affective (product affect) product responses. The implications of these results are discussed.

A Fat Debate on Big Food? Unraveling Blogosphere Reactions

Confronted with public concerns about health and obesity, food companies are taking several initiatives. However, it is unclear to what extent they should communicate these policies. This article explores reactions in the blogosphere to health-related announcements by large food companies. Results show that taste-related announcements generate not only more reactions, but also more positive buzz than knowledge-related announcements. Valence is influenced by issue association per company type: those with highest obesity associations generate more negative blog posts. In case of low issue association, there are only limited blogosphere reactions. This analysis has important implications for managing interaction with social media.

Handling consumer messages on social networking sites : customer service or privacy infringement?

Abstract Firms increasingly use social network sites to reach out to customers and proactively intervene with observed consumer messages. Despite intentions to enhance customer satisfaction by extending customer service, sometimes these interventions are received negatively by consumers. We draw on privacy regulation theory to theorize how proactive customer service interventions with consumer messages on social network sites may evoke feelings of privacy infringement. Subsequently we use privacy calculus theory to propose how these perceptions of privacy infringement, together with the perceived usefulness of the intervention, in turn drive customer satisfaction. In two experiments, we find that feelings of privacy infringement associated with proactive interventions may explain why only reactive interventions enhance customer satisfaction. Moreover, we find that customer satisfaction can be modeled through the calculus of the perceived usefulness and feelings of privacy infringement associated with an intervention. These findings contribute to a better understanding of the impact of privacy concerns on consumer behavior in the context of firm–consumer interactions on social network sites, extend the applicability of privacy calculus theory, and contribute to complaint and compliment management literature. To practitioners, our findings demonstrate that feelings of privacy are an element to consider when handling consumer messages on social media, but also that privacy concerns may be overcome if an intervention is perceived as useful enough.