Distinguishing between the impact of social media public and private compliments on customers ? future service recovery expectations

We seek to explore whether customers? levels of service recovery expectations differ across customers who, prior to the service failure, publicly complimented the firm on social media and customers who, in advance of the service failure, privately complimented the firm on social media. We explore these differences in terms of satisfaction with the service provider and willingness to go back to the service provider. We conduct an experiment to test the research hypotheses. Our study results show that customers who complimented the service provider publicly (relative to privately) on social media in advance of a service failure require a higher level of service recovery to be satisfied with the service provider and go back to the service provider. Further, these effects are partly moderated by customer loyalty and social media usage intensity.