Managing Online Business Complaints: Current Insights and Future Directions

With the development of internet technology and the expansion of the digital economy, online business complaints have increasingly drawn attention from both academia and industry. Despite a growing body of research on online business complaints, there still needs to be more disciplinary perspectives and systematic reviews on this topic. In light of this, this paper adopts a managerial perspective to categorize existing literature into three major areas- online business complaints motivation, factors in causing online business complaint, and online business complaint responses, which clarify the fundamental framework of online business complaint research. Specifically, this study elucidates the mechanistic effects of different types of business products, business services, and customer perceptions on the motivations for complaints. After discussing how specific customer-business relations and contextual factors amplify complaints, the paper summarizes the responses to online business complaints, exploring how businesses can address customer complaints through language style and service recovery. This review offers insights into the future directions of online business complaint research and provides references for businesses in handling customer complaints.