Does Agent Gender Matter? Evidence from Southwest Airlines’ Customer Service on Twitter

Understanding the role of gender in business interactions is of significant importance to companies and society. Inspired by practical concerns of how agent gender might affect customer service interactions, the present study investigates this question using a unique dataset consisting of all public customer service interactions handled by Southwest Airlines’ Twitter account from March 2018 to September 2019. Leveraging the online text-based customer service setting where an agent’s first name serves as the only gender cue, we are able to identify the gender effect on customer behaviors and service outcomes. The identification relies on two unique features of the research context: the assignment of a customer to the next available agent is independent of agent gender; and there is no significant variation, especially gender-induced differences, in an agent’s first response. Both assumptions are supported by the data. Empirical analyses reveal that customers are more likely to continue interactions with female agents than with male agents, yet are more negative in valence of their second tweet towards female agents. Mediation tests further show that customer gender bias in their second tweets leads to downstream effects on service outcomes: interactions with female agents tend to be longer but result in lower resolution rates. Moreover, the treatment effects are moderated by customer personality and public visibility. These results offer valuable lessons to practitioners and academics regarding the unique role of gender in online customer service.