3/02/2023: Shereen Chaudhry

[GabeNicholson]

Comment below with a well-developed question or comment about the reading for this week's workshop.

If you would really like to ask your question in person, please place two exclamation points before your question to signal that you really want to ask it.

Please post your question by Tuesday of the coming week at 11:59 PM. We will also ask you all to upvote questions that you think were particularly good. There may be prizes for top question-askers.

[AlexPrizzy]

Thank you for attending our workshop Shereen! Your work on manager perceptions by public audiences is super interesting and relevant. I'm wondering how these findings generalize across various scenarios and audiences. Your study is based on manager responses to customer reviews of services/products, but will the same manager-audience dynamics uphold if the manager response affects people more personally than just as customer?

In particular I'm wondering how these findings hold for the case of CEO's making public statements when conducting lay offs? For example, Braden Wallake, a CEO who posted an emotional video on LinkedIn to portray an apology and how emotionally taxing it is being the person in charge of making decisions to lay off employee's, was faced with backlash for this video from the public audience. On the other hand, Elon Musk went full unapologetic meme lord troll in the process of laying off Twitter employees. The backlash from the audience wasn't any greater than towards Braden (maybe because expectations of Elon are already low). Both CEO's conducted employee lay offs, one was apologetic, the other was an asshole, the audience didn't like either, what's up with this?

[yuzhouw313]

Hello Professor Shereen Chaudhry, thank you for sharing your work with us! Your discussion on audience's different response and satisfaction level on organization's public response to amends is very insightful and interesting.

I am curious that, despite your research result indicates that only corrective actions and public apologies positively predicted audience satisfaction, what extent do you believe other forms of amends (responsibility acknowledgement, explanation, and counteroffensive strategy) can function in facilitating or mediating the two effective strategies? That is, while the rest of the three strategies do not necessarily positively predict audience satisfaction, do you think the combination of them may also serve as an effective mediator or collectively generate as a public amend tactic?

Thank you again and look forward to seeing you on Thursday!

[Dededon]

Hi Professor Chaudhry, thank you for the sharing! For the questions, I'm particularly interested in the interdisciplinary dialogue of this research. How do you think about the possible use cases of this research? For example, can it be generalized to online discourses or not? Thank you for your patience!

[iefis]

Hi Professor Chaudhry, Thank you for sharing your work with us! The topic is quite interesting and outputs some surprising results. Specifically, I noted that making explanation is positively related to perceiving a response as public apology. However, explanation negatively contributes to customer satisfaction as shown in the propensity score matching. Could you elucidate how we may interpret this result? I'm also wandering if there is any further specification we can add to the study design to further understand this observation. Thank you!

[Sirius2713]

Hi Professor Chaudhry, Thanks for sharing your research with us! It is very interesting to explore public apologies quantitatively. It comes to me that the effect of public apologies is very similar to what we experience in private conversations. I'm wondering how the "public" here specifically makes the effects different compared to private conversations.

[secorey]

Hi Professor Chaudhry,

I found the results of your paper to be very helpful for businesses because they can be easily adopted. It also seems that your findings reinforce the "the customer is always right" adage. While it seems that this is a good rule to live by in the context of making amends on an online review site, it may not always be the best course of action in other contexts, for example in a physical setting where a customer presents a danger to staff or other customers. My question is, what do you think about this idea that "the customer is always right"—specifically, are online contexts a space where this rule can be followed without exception?

[sdbaier]

Dear Professor Chaudhry, thank you for sharing your work-in-progress on strategies of amends-making in the context of organizational transgressions.

Is there any way to tease out baseline contentious stances (e.g., because of prior negative experience with an organization or a general negative public sentiment) from negative sentiments that are purely issue-based? My suspicion would be that customers respond differently to transgressions if the corresponding organization is a priori seen in a negative light than to comparable cases where there are no contentious feelings beforehand.

On a related note, is the assumption that manager response is independent of the type and sentiment of customer reviews tenable? Not all managers respond to customer reviews, and even for managers that do respond, they do not necessarily respond to all reviews. The following paper explores the selective response of organizations in the context of organizational response to social movements and might be helpful: https://doi.org/10.5465/AMBPP.2021.16439abstract

Lastly, in measuring audience satisfaction, is your assessment purely based on third-party observers? In the dataset, are there instances of replies from reviewers to managers (after the latter responded), forming a conversation-like structure? These occurrences are likely rare, but would allow to better gauge audience satsfaction.

[pranathiiyer]

Thank you for sharing your work with us professor! I was wondering if you have a sense of the relation between the scale of a company and the act of public apology? My sense if that this might benefit bigger companies which already have a hold of large market share. But how much would such practices affect smaller firms? Would be interesting to know your perspective on this interaction!

[mingxuan-he]

Hi Professor Chaudhry, Regarding the effects of corrective actions, I'm curious if you observed any differences in customer satisfaction following true promised changes (promise followed by actual change) and false promises (promised but not changed), especially whether the latter, when found out by customers, lead to backslash in negative reviews. Thank you so much!

[borlasekn]

Prof. Chaudhry,

Thank-you for sharing your work. I know that your work looks at the company level amends making, but I was wondering how your work would translate should you separate the amends-making of individuals within a company (say, an executive who needs to make a statement on behalf of the company) versus the company as a whole speaking for its constituents against a particular action of the company or employee(s) within the company. It seems like the responses/amends may be different based on who the "speaker" is. Your dataset included hotel manager responses. Would this change if some hidden representative from the hotel posted as the "hotel", instead of a manager responding to the posts?

[zihua-uc]

Dear Professor Chaudhry,

I wonder if there are any results on repeated apologies. For example, if organizations keep making mistakes, but they apologize every time, will consumers eventually get tired of these apologies because no corrective measures were taken.

Thank you!

[KekunH]

Hi Professor Chaudhry, I found your finding really intriguing and intuitive. If someone would like to do more research to complement your study on this topic, do you have any guidance on what they should do? Thanks!

[sushanz]

Hello Professor Chaudhry, thank you for taking time sharing your ideas with us! Both topics are pretty interesting. I never thought about the risk of apologizing first could be explained by game theories as well. Understanding the mutual behaviors between people is beneficial to the maintenance of harmony and corporation among the society groups. With my limited understanding in behavioral science, it will be great if you can explain more of the differences between public apologies and the individual or mutual exclusive type of apologies.

[JunoWuu]

Hello Professor Chaudhry, thank you for sharing! This topic about amends making is really interesting. From one perspective, it can benefits business. From another perspective, I wonder how much it can benefits public policy and governments. Another question I have is about whether there will be follow ups on these comments. For example, if a representative from a company apologized and mentioned that corrective actions will be made but the customers later found out the actions are not in place, what would their satisfaction level be like?

[javad-e]

Thank you so much for presenting your research at our workshop, Prof. Chaudhry! The distinction between responsibility acknowledgment and public apology is very interesting to me. I was wondering if you considered analyzing the topics of the comments. In particular, do you think it is possible for particular types of comments, e.g. complaints about food compared to complaints about staff behavior, to simultaneously be both more likely to induce an action compared to an apology AND easier to satisfy the customers about?

[yjhuang99]

Thank you for sharing your work with us, Prof. Chaudhry! This work is super interesting and very relevant to our daily lives. I wonder if it is possible to use NLP to extract the keywords from the coded variables from MTurk for practical implications.

[WonjeYun]

Dear Professor Chaudhry, Thank you for sharing your research with us. While reading your paper, I had to wonder how the satisfaction from a third-party would best approximate the satisfaction of the customers who filled out the complaints? I understand that it is difficult to get the actual response, but it could seem that the satisfaction of the customers and third-party people would deviate

[yhchou0904]

Dear Prof. Chaudhry, Thank you for sharing your idea with us! The research seems to try to extract the effect of amending by both running linear regressions and reweighing with the propensity score. What I am curious about is that sometimes the distributions of treated and untreated groups might differ a lot, causing some support issues. In this case, even if we could estimate the possibility of being treated, we could possibly only focus on only a few samples, especially with this small sample size. Does this situation happen in the data? If yes, have you tackled the problem, and how?

[JoeHelbing]

Interesting question, thank you for sharing the work Professor Chaudhry,

Can't quite help but wonder about the source though. I understand your methods were particular to try and isolate the abstract effect based on the footnotes, but I can't get away from wondering about the source ie. I'm sure if it was Comcast, (or some other companies) the lengths that would be required to achieve a sincere rating would be extraordinary in comparison to Joan's local muffin shop.

[LuZhang0128]

Hi Professor Chaudhry,

Thank you for sharing your research. I just wonder how much interpersonal theories can be applied to the individual-organizational tie. What are the differences and similarities theoretically? Additionally, I was wondering if there might be an opportunity to conduct a follow-up study on the customers themselves, rather than relying solely on third-party perceptions. This could provide valuable insights into the dynamics of the individual-organizational tie.

[hsinkengling]

Hi Professor Chaudhry

Thank you for sharing your work with us. The study is very interesting, as it empirically tells us what makes a good apology. Can you talk a little bit about the choice of data collection on TripAdvisor, as compared with reviews of products on Amazon or Ebay? It seems that corrective action might be more suitable for products rather than for one-time customers.

I'm also curious if you have data that examines whether managers were selective in which complaints they choose to respond to.

[taizeyu]

Dear Professor Chaudhry.

I am so appreciative for your speech. I am curious about what kinds of benefit this research has for the direct benefit of people and organizations.

[awaidyasin]

Thanks for sharing your research! I wonder if your results are robust to adding the existing perception of a firm. Oftentimes, people have strong opinions towards some firms (Amazon or Facebook, for example), and no matter what the apology style or content, the CEO would be viewed in a negative light. I suppose firm idiosyncracies would have some role to play in explaining these perceptions then.

[Peihan12]

Hello, Prof. Chaudhry Your conclusion genuinely intrigued and made sense to me. I'm interested to know if you noticed any differences in customer satisfaction between true promised changes and false promises, especially if the latter resulted in a backlash in unfavorable reviews when customers learned about them. I greatly appreciate it.

[helyap]

Hi Professor Chaudhry,

Thank you for sharing your work with us. I am curious if there are any gender effects in these mechanisms. Is the gender of the apologizing manager deducible from the posting and do you think it would have an effect on how customers weigh the apology? Similarly, does the gender of the rating customer moderate the effect of the amends-making?

[hshi420]

Hi Professor Chaudhry,

As the business develops, how generalizable are the factors going to be? Do you think the factors can just be modified a little and applied in any business model or platform?

[fiofiofiona]

Hi Professor Chaudhry, thank you for sharing your work! I am particularly interested in the application aspect of this research and would like to learn whether factors in real-world situations would change the theoretical outcomes.

[zoeyjiao1104]

Hi Professor Chaudhry,

Thank you so much for sharing your work. I am very curious about the use cases of your study. Because you emphasize the concept of customer-centric, do you think your study could extend to drive business actions and improve customer experience. Thank you!

[tangn121]

Thank you for sharing your work with us, Professor Chaudhry! I have learned that amends-making strategies can improve customer satisfaction and even increase customer loyalty. Have you considered studying the correlation between amends-making strategies and customer loyalty? Additionally, is there a method to measure the extent to which customer satisfaction is increased? Thank you!

[shaangao]

Hi Professor Chaudhry, thanks for sharing your research with us! I was wondering whether there also exists any disadvantage to public apologies for organizations, such as drawing customers' and competitors' attention to its shortcomings; because in real life, both individuals and organizations still handle public apologies in a relatively conservative manner, meaning that they would avoid making apologies unless absolutely necessary. To what extent do you think this caution is warranted, how do you think the advantages and disadvantages of apologies trade off in different situations?

[erweinstein]

Hi Professor Chaudhry,

Your work is a very interesting and impactful use of the data source of TripAdvisor customer reviews and hotel manager responses.

In my experience using TripAdvisor, responses from the hotel managers are very "bi-modal"; responses seem to cluster into groups of responses that 1) deny any actual harm occurred while making an empty statement of regret ("we're sorry that you didn't enjoy your stay..."), or that 2) apologize clearly while mentioning a specific form of corrective action ("please contact us so we can help make this right"). If I'm correct about this (the bi-modality), it might be an interesting fact about hotel manager apologies that's orthogonal to your results and the main factors you investigate. However, the pattern I'm describing would not necessarily be observable if we ignore the lowest 2 tiers of ratings ("poor" and "terrible"), where more serious problems from the angriest customers (some of which might actually be misunderstandings), and therefore, responses that get profuse apologies and complete rejection, would occur. Which raises the question: what else might we be missing by only looking at one rating type (the "average" rating)?

[Ry-Wu]

Hi professor Chaudhry, thank you for sharing such an amazing work with us! Your method for assessing amends-making effectiveness is very interesting. Looking forward to your presentation tomorrow.

[jinyz1220]

Thank you for providing your inspiring work! I am specifically interested in partial least squares-structural equation modeling and how it performs on latent variables. Are there any assumptions about using this model? (e.g., normality, homoscedasticity)

[yujing-syj]

Hi Professor Chaudhry, thanks so much for sharing your interesting research with us! I have a question about the data. Since there are only 692 final observations, whether the result is robust? And also, can you consider using some NLP techniques to generate the labels? Thanks!

[Toushirow1]

Hi Professor Chaudhry, thanks for sharing your research. How does this differ from prior research on amends-making in interpersonal conflict, and what unique insights can be gained from examining a secondary dataset of manager responses to customer reviews from TripAdvisor?

[linhui1020]

Hi Prof. Chaudhry, thanks for sharing your work with us and presenting your work with us. I am interested in how power dynamics influence the expression convention in amends-making. are there any power distance between companies customer, and how the relationship between organization (membership) and customers increase/decrease their amends making?

[y8script]

Hello Prof. Chaudhry, thank you for sharing your interesting work on defining components of amends-making strategies and exploring the effect of each factor with a quasi-experimental design. For your ongoing study that explores Twitter data, I am curious about how to adapt your definition of explicit apologies to models that can be used on a large text corpus. Will it be a similar approach to how we detect sentiment, which acts as your dependent variable? If so, how could you validate your coding of explicit apologies with human ratings?

[Yuxin-Ji]

Hi Professor Chaudhry, thank you for sharing the research with us. It is an interesting paper on amends-making strategies. I share a similar concern with some of the questions on that the data size is relatively small, so the result might not be too robust. I am also curious if there is a difference in amend-making patterns across platforms, such as Expedia, Yelp, Bookings, etc.

[ChongyuFang]

Hi Prof. Chaidhry, thank you for presenting us your work! What are the components of amends-making strategies used by managers to repair audience satisfaction in response to service failures, as identified in the study?

[cgyhumble0612]

Hi Professor, I appreciate you share us such an interesting research! I'm very impressed by the idea behind this paper and the dataset. I'm wondering whether we can use the founding in other fields such as financial market? How can we apply it? Thank you.

[mdvadillo]

Hi Professo Chaudhry, thank you for sharing your work with us, I found the topic very interesting. A follow-up question I had was how does the magnitude of the offense affect the effectiveness of the apology/response? I assume that limiting the sample to hotel reviews minimizes the variability among complaints, so this may not be possible to answer given the current data and process.

[LynetteDang]

Thank you for sharing your work with us Professor Chaudhry. Your research is fascinating to read about, and frankly apology is something we have encountered at a daily basis but haven't thought too much into. I am wondering: 1. what made you choose the 900 manager responses to customer reviews of hotels on TripAdvisor, have you considered scale up the data? 2. alternative to a least square regression, it could be interesting to fit a neural network or use other techniques.

[ValAlvernUChic]

Hello Professor Chaudhry, thank you for sharing your paper. I was wondering how your findings would vary across different contexts - specifically non-hospitality related business. I imagine that with hotels, there's a greater expectation of service compared to other service establishments. With that, I wonder how this would look like say in restaurants.

[DehongUChi]

Hello Professor Chaudhry. Thank you for sharing your work with us! My question is: to what degree can your findings be applied to interpersonal relationships?

[yutaili]

Thanks for sharing your work Professor Chaudhry. It's a really interesting topic in the fields of public relations as well as quantitative social science, and results provide a guidance that we can refer to in real-life. One question about the experimental procedure. It seems like you used Mturk to code the customer reviews and manager responses into five categories. Have you doing any validation check on the accuracy of the coding result. Do you think implementing some natural-language-processing techniques could be an alternative way to classify the review? Thanks.

[bningdling]

Hi Professor Chaudhry, thank you so much for sharing your work. I was wondering what is the underlying mechanism behind the larger effect size of corrective actions compared to apologies in enhancing audience satisfaction. I am curious about if there are any specific types of corrective actions that are more effective than others.

[hazelchc]

Hi Professor Chaudhry, thank you so much for sharing your interesting work with us! You mentioned that most of this past work on identifying different strategies of amends-making is on interpersonal conflict so you would like to fill the gap by studying in a managerial context. Could you further explain why it is important? Thank you!

[YLHan97]

Hi Professor Chaudhry, thank you so much for sharing your work. I have the following questions:

1. How do managers determine when a public apology is necessary to make amends with their audience?
2. What are some common mistakes managers make when attempting to make amends with their audience?

[BaotongZh]

Hi Professor Chaudhry, thank you for sharing your great work with me. I was just wondering how the amends-making strategies of one firm would affect the amends-making strategies of other firms at the organizational level. How would this competition affect customers' perceptions of the firms?

[xin2006]

Hi Professor Chaudhry, thanks so much for sharing the work. For the work of coding data, I am curious how the five waves were decided, and what are the distribution of them?