EXPRESS: The Implications of Generic Responses in Online Customer Service Operations

Businesses use a range of strategies to manage online customer service, with social media serving as a popular platform. A growing practice in social-media customer service is the use of generic responses to address customer inquiries. Our study investigates the impact of these generic responses on customer engagement and satisfaction. We analyze social media data from one of the largest banks in the United States and apply machine-learning techniques to extract relevant information from textual data. We leverage a quasi-experimental setting in which a generic response to a customer’s inquiry serves as the treatment. We find that generic responses increase the likelihood that customers reply to the bank. Among customers who reply, generic responses are associated with lower satisfaction. However, our further analyses show that under certain conditions, strategic use of generic responses is associated with higher customer satisfaction. Our findings provide guidance to operation managers regarding how generic responses can be tailored and used to improve online customer service operations.