Breaking it down: How does multiline messaging affect service quality in text‐based customer support?

Computer‐mediated communication channels, such as text‐based chat, can improve response speed and scalability while lowering operational costs for customer support. Yet, there has been a growing concern regarding the remote nature of digital communication leading to customer dissatisfaction. This study investigates how communication style—specifically, multiline messaging—can alleviate this concern and affect quality in digital service interactions. Leveraging a unique data set of text‐based conversations from a service center, we show that breaking down lengthy statements into multiple lines (i.e., multiline messaging) can improve problem resolution. However, this impact exhibits an inverted U‐shaped relationship; although moderate segmentation aids task‐oriented problem resolution, excessive multiline messaging backfires by inducing cognitive overload. In contrast, we find that customer satisfaction increases monotonically with multiline messaging intensity. Finally, we demonstrate that multiline messaging interacts positively with agent sentiment to further enhance both problem resolution and customer satisfaction. Our work contributes to the digital service literature by identifying a low cost, communication‐based mechanism that can improve service performance, thereby addressing the cost–benefit trade‐off often debated in the field. It also enriches the emerging people‐centric operations literature by introducing a novel, effective communication construct to the set of human‐related drivers of work performance.