The dynamic customer engagement behaviors in the customer satisfaction survey

Conducting customer satisfaction surveys (CSS) as a means of encouraging customers' engagement with a firm is a widely used managerial practice. In an effort to convert this customer-to-firm engagement into customer-to-customer engagement, many firms have recently started to ask customers who reach the final question of the CSS to write an online review that will be automatically posted on a review site (e.g., Google or TripAdvisor). Using a unique longitudinal data set provided by a large global hotel chain, we aim to understand the drivers behind CSS participation and, ultimately, behind online review posting in response to a prompt at the end of a survey. We employ the Hidden Markov model (HMM) to analyze how a customer's engagement state changes as a function of previous managerial responses, loyalty program membership, and satisfaction. The results reveal that customers have a greater tendency to transfer to higher engagement states if managers have responded to prior customer surveys. We have also found that the higher the customer's loyalty program membership status is, the more likely it is that they will participate in a survey. Lastly, we show that customers have a greater tendency to post negative versus positive reviews. We then discuss the implications of this study for researchers and managers.