Customer Service on Social Media: The Effect of Customer Popularity and Sentiment on Airline Response

Many companies are now providing customer service through social media, helping and engaging their customers on a real-time basis. To study this increasingly popular practice, we examine how major airlines respond to customer comments on Twitter by exploiting a large data set containing all Twitter exchanges between customers and four major airlines from June 2013 to August 2014. We find that these airlines pay significantly more attention to Twitter users with more followers, suggesting that companies literarily discriminate customers based on their social influence. Moreover, our findings suggest that companies in the digital age are increasingly more sensitive to the need to answer both customer complaints and customer compliments.