Observational study shows higher positive review volume in hospitality businesses receiving attentive and selective complaint responses, highlighting effective webcare strategies.
Webcare requires service providers to publicly respond to negative online customer reviews, creating visible complaint–response exchanges that also influence observers. Although research shows that responding to reviews benefits providers, it offers limited guidance on how the content and pattern of responses are related to subsequent customer behavior. Drawing on signaling and justice conceptualizations, this research explores how three response characteristics, namely, attentiveness, justice cues, and response patterns, are associated with subsequent positive review volume. Using text-mining on 371,878 customer review complaint–response exchanges for hotels and restaurants on Tripadvisor and Yelp, results show providers’ attentiveness to service aspects raised in complaints is positively associated with higher subsequent positive review volume. This association is strengthened when responses also include procedural or distributive justice cues. Moreover, selective responses to negative reviews correspond to greater subsequent positive review volume than blanket responses to all negative reviews. These findings provide empirically grounded insights into webcare and help guide service providers on what to say and how broadly to respond to online complaints.
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Paulich et al. (2026) studied this question.
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