Happy Users, Grumpy Bosses: Current Community Engagement Literature and the Impact of Support Engagement in a B2B Setting on User and Upper Management Satisfaction

Managerial interest in facilitating online communities is thriving. We provide an overview of the current literature on community engagement from which we conclude that community engagement is investigated in various settings (in B2B and B2C environments), with various purposes (e.g., product support, brand communities), and shows somewhat mixed outcomes. Also, outcomes of community engagement are always investigated at the individual user level, even in B2B settings. However, in B2B networks there are often multiple layers within one organization, as the individual who uses a community is often distinct from the individual(s) responsible for purchase decisions. In the empirical part of our chapter, we go beyond the individual user by investigating how both users and upper management value the various ways their organization obtains customer support.

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