Does Culture Influence The Way Managers Address Negative e-WoM?: A Cross-Cultural Comparative Study Of Anglo And Germanic Managers On TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor is the largest online travel community (TripAdvisor, 2016) and its vast content is an opportunity to examine e-word of mouth online complaint handling, differences in service provision and customer expectation, and... [ view full abstract ]

TripAdvisor is the largest online travel community (TripAdvisor, 2016) and its vast content is an opportunity to examine e-word of mouth online complaint handling, differences in service provision and customer expectation, and the management of online communities. This study examines how culture influences the way managers handle negative e-word of mouth in the context of the hotel industry by employing a cross-cultural comparative study of Anglo and Germanic managers on TripAdvisor. Netnography (Kozinets, 2002) is used to collect 334 randomly selected managerial responses to negative TripAdvisor reviews. The responses were collected from, three Germanic (Berlin, Vienna and Zurich) and three Anglo cities (London, Dublin and Edinburgh). Davidow’s (2003) complaint management framework was modified by incorporating themes identified by Kelleher (2009), van Noort and Willemsen (2012) and Zhang and Vásquez (2014).

The framework’s attributes of timeliness, facilitation, apology, credibility, attentiveness, generalness and personalisation was applied to each managerial response. Timeliness is the speed at which an organisation responds to complaints; facilitation are the policies and procedures in place to deal with complaints, redress is the benefit a customer gets out of the complaint; apology is the acknowledgement of problem; credibility is the organisation’s willingness to explain why service failure occurred and what and/or if measures will be taken to prevent reoccurrence; and attentiveness is the level of interpersonal communication between the organisation and the customer (Davidow, 2003). Generalness is the level of standardisation of the managerial response and personalisation is the level of humanisation of the response (Davidow, 2003; Kelleher 2009; van Noort and Willemsen, 2012; Zhang and Vásquez, 2014). The qualitative data was transformed into numerical values via the categorising data coding approach to derive categories to enable a cross-cultural comparison between the clusters (Saunders et al, 2009).

The findings indicate there are differences in the manner negative e-word of mouth is managed between the Anglo and Germanic clusters. Differences not only occurred between the clusters, but also between the three cultures within each cluster. The countries of both clusters share similarities in relative and absolute values in terms of strengths and weaknesses in managing negative electronic word of mouth. Three secondary findings emerged during the data analysis process. Firstly, TripAdvisor’s review and property verification mechanisms are potentially flawed. Secondly, most customers in the hotel industry complain for similar reasons. Finally, managers do not appear to use any framework to assess the quality of responses to negative reviews. The findings confirm culture influences the way managers handle negative electronic word of mouth. Overall, Anglo managers perform better on timelessness, facilitation and generalness. Germanic managers perform better on the credibility and attentiveness dimension. The differences between the apology and personalisation dimensions are marginal.

A research limitation is that data was collected from one city of each cluster, which may result in a not representative sample. Although the findings confirmed cultural differences, it does explain the reasons for them. Future research could develop an advanced complaint-handling framework and consider the cultural background of the customer who complained.