Handling Online Complaint Conversations on Social Media

Social media channels are increasingly used by consumers to complain to a company. Contrary to traditional channels, the complaint and its handling are observable to others and unaffected customers can be involved. Effective online complaint management bears the extraordinary opportunity for the companies to not only win back the complainer but also other users and shape reputation. To harvest this opportunity, we aim to gain a better understanding of the complaint recovery process and factors that contribute to recovery satisfaction. We address the research questions: (1) What is the influence of the changed conversation structure due to interference of other customers that interact, e.g., by providing help, defending the company, or confirming the complaint; (2) How to establish an effective conversation as a service manager to improve customer satisfaction? Analysing the conversation as a flow based on communication type and content categories may provide insights on “successful communication patterns” that end with satisfied customers and the other way. We aim to develop innovative methods to automatically identify these categories via text mining and natural language processing, and analyse communication patterns and success factors through process mining. We team up with DHL, which has a highly-utilized online customer support service, to make a preliminary investigation of customer complaint conversations and determine patterns of successful communication in social media. With this initial research, we aim to establish the basis of an extensive project to develop an innovative real-time online complaint handling support system for the creative professional in the companies.