“I'm here to help” : How companies' microblog responses to consumer problems influence brand perceptions

Purpose – Customers have high expectations that company representatives contacted online will go out of their way to be helpful. One type of social media that may be particularly useful as a customer relationship management (CRM) tool is microblogging platforms such as Twitter. The purpose of this paper is to look at the impact of perceived helpfulness of customer representative microblog responses on people's perceptions of brand trust, brand benevolence, brand attitudes and intentions to try or purchase a brand. Design/methodology/approach – A field experiment was conducted to manipulate three variables: type of helpfulness response (empathetic or problem‐solving), amount of helpfulness (less or more helpful), and interface in which responses were viewed (branded, Google, or Twitter). Findings – The interaction between type of helpfulness and amount of helpfulness led to greater perceptions of company trustworthiness and benevolence when there were many problem‐solving responses than when there were few, but the number of empathetic postings did not reveal this same pattern. Furthermore, attitudes towards the brand were greater when there were many problem‐solving postings than when there were few problem‐solving postings, and lower when there were many empathetic postings than when there were few empathetic postings. Originality/value – Marketers must think carefully about whether they have the necessary resources to successfully engage consumers on microblogs. This paper found that simply acknowledging that a problem exists is not the level of engagement that consumers expect. Thus, companies that cannot afford to monitor microblogs for signs of consumer distress and then respond to consumers' problems are advised to not publicly respond in purely empathetic ways.