Observers’ complaint language perceptions: a new measure to aid social media service recovery evaluations

Brands continue to offer social media customer service despite many unexplored challenges. One unknown aspect is observers' perceptions of another customer's complaint language, in particular, when alternative linguistics are used by complainants (e.g. i h8 ur brand). This work develops and validates a new instrument to measure observers' complaint language perceptions, defined as non-complainants' (i.e. observers on social media) cognitive perceptions of how well a complainant communicates their failure to a firm when seeking a recovery on social media. Five data collections follow the multi-stage measure development process to produce a reliable and valid representation of observers' complaint language perceptions.