She? The Role of Perceived Agent Gender in Social Media Customer Service

Junyuan Ke, Yang Gao, Huaxia Rui, Shujing Sun

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

This work investigated the role of perceived agent gender in customer behavior using a unique dataset from Southwest Airlines' Twitter account. We inferred agent gender based on the first names provided by agents when responding to customers. We measured customer behavior using three outcomes: whether a customer decided to continue the service conversation upon receiving an agent's initial response as well as the valence and arousal levels in their second tweet if the customer chose to continue the interaction. Our identification strategy relied on the Backdoor Criterion and hinged on the assumption that customer service requests are assigned to the next available agent, independent of agent gender. The findings revealed that customers were more likely to continue interactions with female agents than male agents and they were more negative in valence but less intense in arousal with the former group than with the latter.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 57th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS 2024
EditorsTung X. Bui
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages1796-1805
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9780998133171
StatePublished - 2024
Event57th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS 2024 - Honolulu, United States
Duration: Jan 3 2024Jan 6 2024

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
ISSN (Print)1530-1605

Conference

Conference57th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS 2024
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityHonolulu
Period1/3/241/6/24

Keywords

  • Customer Service
  • Gender
  • Social Media
  • Stereotype

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Engineering

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