Forthcoming at MIS Quarterly
Text-based customer service is emerging as an important channel through which companies can assist customers. However, the use of few identity cues may cause customers to feel limited social presence and even suspect the human identity of agents, especially in the current age of advanced algorithms. Does such a lack of social presence affect service interactions? We studied this timely question by evaluating the impact of customers’ perceived social presence on service outcomes and customers’ attitudes toward agents. Our identification strategy hinged on Southwest Airlines’ sudden requirement to include a first name in response to service requests on Twitter, which enhanced customers’ perceived level of social presence. This change led customers to become more willing to engage and more likely to reach a resolution upon engagement. We further conducted a randomized experiment to understand the underlying mechanisms. We found that the effects were mainly driven by customers who were ex ante uncertain or suspicious about the human identity of agents, and the presence of identity cues improved service outcomes by enhancing customers’ perceived levels of trust and empathy. Additionally, we found no evidence of elevated verbal aggression from customers toward agents with identity cues, although a mechanism test revealed the moderating role of customers’ emotional states. Our study highlights the importance of social presence in text-based customer service and suggests a readily available and almost costless strategy for firms: signal humanization through identity cues.

Journal of Operations Management
While the field experiment is a powerful and well-established method to investigate causal relationships, operations management (OM) has embraced this methodology only in recent years. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the existing OM literature leveraging field experiments. It also serves as a one-stop guide for future application of field experiments in the OM area. We start by recapping the characteristics that distinguish field experiments from other common types of experiments and organizing the relevant OM studies by topic. Corresponding to the commonly overlooked issues in field experiment-based OM studies, we then provide a detailed roadmap, ranging from experimental design and implementation to post-experiment analysis. We further outline the methodological and practical issues as well as corresponding solutions when applying field experiments. We conclude by identifying future research directions from an OM perspective.

Journal of Management Information Systems
Despite many advantages of social media as a customer service channel, there is a concern that active service intervention encourages excessive service complaints. Our paper casts doubt on this misconception by examining the dynamics between social media customer complaints and brand service interventions. We find service interventions indeed cause more complaints, yet this increase is driven by service awareness rather than chronic complaining. Due to the publicity and connectivity of social media, customers learn about the new service channel by observing customer service delivery to others – a mechanism that is unique to social media customer service and does not exist for traditional call centers. Importantly, high-quality service reduces future complaints, thereby proactive customer service is a sound strategy on social media, as long as firms dedicate to service quality. Hence, firms should be less concerned about whether to respond and more focused on how to respond to customer complaints.

Information Systems Research
Overcrowding in emergency rooms (ERs) is a common yet nagging problem. It not only is costly for hospitals but also compromises care quality and patient experience. Hence, finding effective ways to improve ER care delivery is of great importance. Using a large dataset covering all emergency visits of New York State from 2010 to 2014, we investigate whether telemedicine enhances ER care delivery. We show that, on average, telemedicine availability in the ER significantly reduces average patients’ length of stay (LOS), which is partially driven by the flexible resource allocation. Specifically, the adoption of telemedicine leads to a larger reduction in ER LOS when there is a demand surge or supply shortage. Furthermore, such improvement is not a byproduct of other widely adopted health IT applications and does not come at the expense of care quality or patient cost. We also replicate the analysis using annual U.S. hospital data and find that ER telemedicine adoption significantly reduces average patients’ waiting time, which suggests that the LOS reduction partially comes from the reduction of waiting time.

Understanding the effect of gender in business interactions is of significant importance to companies and society. Inspired by the practical concerns about how gender affects customer support interactions, the present study investigated the role of perceived agent gender in customer behavior using a unique dataset consisting of all public customer service interactions handled by Southwest Airlines’ Twitter account from March 2018 to September 2019. We inferred agent gender based on the first names provided by agents when responding to customers. In addition, we measured customer behavior using three outcomes: whether a customer decided to continue the service conversation upon receiving an agent’s initial response as well as the valence and arousal levels in their second tweet if the customer chose to continue the interaction. Our identification strategy was based on the Backdoor Criterion and hinged on the assumption that customer service requests are assigned to the next available agent, independent of agent gender. The findings revealed that customers were more likely to continue interactions with female agents than male agents and that customers’ messages were more negative in valence but less intense in arousal with the former group than with the latter. These results are consistent with our theoretical predictions and offer valuable insights both to practitioners and to academics.

Telemedicine has long been of interest to the U.S. general public. Yet, despite the advent of high-speed internet and mobile device technology, telemedicine did not reach its full potential until the COVID-19 pandemic spurred its unparalleled adoption. This sudden shift in the setting of healthcare delivery raises questions regarding possible changes in clinical decision-making. Using a unique set of patient-provider encounter data from the U.S. in 2020 and 2021, we examine the effect of telemedicine on antibiotic prescription errors for urinary tract infections. We consider two types of prescription errors: prescribing when not recommended by guidelines (type I errors) and not prescribing when recommended (type II errors). After accounting for potential endogeneity issues using provider fixed effects and an instrumental variable approach, we find a significantly lower likelihood of overall prescription errors (type I and II errors combined) with telemedicine relative to in-person encounters. We also find heterogeneous effects by provider patient volume and patient-provider relationship. Further analyses show that the reduction in prescription errors is mainly attributable to type I errors, and that patient health outcomes are not compromised when care is delivered via telemedicine. Finally, we discuss managerial implications for the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, as well as policy implications for governments.

Follow-up appointment is a critical part of the healthcare process that benefits patients and providers. However, due to various barriers, patients often have limited access to follow-up appointments. In this study, we examine the telemedicine application to follow-up service and its implications to care access, service efficiency, and care quality. By collaborating with a large Asian hospital that sequentially adopted the tele-follow-up service in different departments, we leverage a staggered difference-in-differences design in estimating the treatment effects. We find that the adoption of telemedicine significantly increases the follow-up volume by 54%. Moreover, telemedicine generates positive spillover effects on onsite care provision, with onsite follow-up visits increasing by 10.7% and onsite initial visits increasing by 5.7%. We further investigate the mechanism underlying these results from the demand side and supply side. On the demand side, we find that tele-follow-up service attracts patients to the hospital for both initial and follow-up services, particularly those with higher costs in getting onsite follow-up care, such as patients with higher transportation costs or comorbidities. On the supply side, the adoption enhances physicians’ service efficiency through task specialization and more focused practice. It also improves care quality, as evidenced by a significant reduction in the readmission rate. Our study demonstrates the value of tele-follow-up services and provides insights for healthcare practitioners and policymakers as they navigate the transition to the era of health IT.

We study the effect of the telehealth expansion policy on rural-urban healthcare-access disparities. Using a unique set of national healthcare claims data, we address three questions concerning the uptake of telehealth during COVID-19: (1) Does the expansion reduce the disparity in overall healthcare access between rural and urban areas? (2) Do telehealth visits complement or substitute in-person visits? (3) What barriers prevent healthcare providers and patients from adopting telehealth? We use providers from rural areas as the control group and compare the total number of visits between urban and rural providers before and after telehealth expansion. We find that urban providers treated significantly more patients than rural providers, and such an increase is driven by increased care access of urban patients. Therefore, the finding suggests an enlarged rural-urban disparity regarding patients’ overall access to care. Moreover, we find urban patients substitute in-person visits with telehealth visits. However, rural patients have much lower adoption rates of telehealth services and continue with in-person visits. We supplement the paper with analyses of heterogeneous treatment effects by providers and barriers that have affected individuals’ telehealth adoptions.