Deescalating Arousal in Social Media Complaints: Using Active Listening and Empathy to Enhance Customer Gratitude

As most customers prefer complaining on social media (vs. other mediums), firms must learn how to effectively deescalate negative, high arousal emotions through text-based exchanges to achieve service recoveries. With field studies and experiments, we identify ways to mitigate negative arousal in digital text-based interactions, specifically, active listening and empathy.