Apology or empathy? Discerning differences in customers’ perception of corporate language use

For more than a decade, research on webcare has been examining how to properly react to customers’ online complaints (van Noort and Willemsen 2012). However, this question has been approached differently by diverse fields, such as marketing (Weitzl & Hutzinger, 2017) and linguistics (Lutzky 2021a). Therefore, this study adopts an interdisciplinary approach and focusses on the separate and interactive role of empathy and apologies in webcare responses. Instead of regarding apologies purely as illocutionary force indicating devices (e.g., sorry), we consider additional elements of the apology speech act set (Blum-Kulka & Olshtain, 1984), specifically, explanation, confirmation, and redress.
We ran an online experiment with 785 respondents imaging a delayed flight (Mage = 31.64, SDage = 11.37; female = 60%) with a 2 (response empathy: no empathy vs. empathy) x 4 (response accommodativeness: apology vs. apology & explanation vs. apology & explanation & confirmation vs. apology & explanation & confirmation & redress) between-subjects design, since research of the airline industry’s customer communication on Twitter has shown a respective gap (Lutzky, 2021b). Our results show that the empathy only group triggered significantly more response attentiveness and repurchase intention than the apology only group. Receiving an empathetic – as compared to unempathetic – response, makes respondents perceive it as more attentive and they develop a stronger desire to book the airline again. In addition, with rising levels of accommodativeness, response attentiveness increases. This holds for repurchase intention, while offering redress has no additional effect. Furthermore, our results show that empathy increases the effect of the lowest two levels of accommodativeness, however its effect vanishes when explanations and confirmations are provided.
Our work explores the effect of combining different webcare strategies, which has not received sufficient attention (Lopes et al. 2023). Overall, our findings reveal important insights into how airlines should best respond to dissatisfied customers online.