The impact of cyberostracism on online complaint handling

Purpose – This research aims to examine how consumers react to being ignored by a company once they have complained about an online service failure. The authors seek to propose that automatic reply e‐mails to customer complaints are considered a form of cyberostracism, thus having equally harmful effects on customer perceptions as a mere no reply.Design/methodology/approach – The authors first conducted a qualitative study to ensure that consumers feel ignored when companies fail to respond to their e‐mails. This was followed by an experimental study that tested the research propositions. The experimental design was a 3 (ostracism) × 2 (severity of failure) factorial between‐subjects design.Findings – The results indicated that consumers did not perceive any significant difference between an automatic reply e‐mail and no reply at all and perceived both to be a form of cyberostracism. It was also found that cyberostracism led to higher levels of negative emotions, lower levels of satisfaction, and higher l...

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