Reading Between the Lines: Understanding Customer Experience With Disruptive Technology Through Online Reviews

Abstract

A customer’s experience with a brand, as evidenced in online customer reviews, has attracted multidisciplinary scholarly attention. Customer experience plays an important role as an antecedent to brand engagement, brand adoption, and eventual brand loyalty. Thus, it is important for businesses to understand their customers’ experiences so that they can make changes as necessary. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented changes to the business landscape, forcing businesses to move online, with many utilizing enterprise video conferencing (EVC) to maintain daily operations. To ensure efficient digitization, many turned to the online reviews of others’ experiences with EVC before engaging with it themselves. This research examined how the customer experience is portrayed through emotional tone and word choice in online reviews for the EVC platform Zoom. Using computerized text analysis, key differences were found in the emotional tone and word choice for low- and high-rated reviews. The complexity and emotionality expressed in reviews have implications on the usability of the review for others. The results from this study suggest that online customer reviews with a high rating express a higher level of expertise and confidence than low-rated reviews. Given the potential dissemination and impact, digital marketers may be well advised to first and foremost respond to online reviews that are high in emotional tone.