The Value of Social Media Customer Support During the Pandemic

Many companies are utilizing social media as the primary avenue for customer service during the pandemic. However, how customers' behaviors and interactions with customer service agents on social media are impacted by the lockdowns has not been well understood. In this study, we examine the impact of lockdowns and physical distancing on changes in customers' behaviors, such as emotional expressions in tweets and customers' satisfaction with social media customer service. Using a difference-in-differences research design, we find that with the lockdowns and physical distancing, customers expressed more negative emotions when tweeting the company they were having issues with. Surprisingly, compared to before the pandemic period, customers' emotional expressions became more positive and they were more likely to express their satisfaction after interacting with customer service agents. Interestingly, our findings reveal that gender differences exist in these scenarios. We also discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings. © 2023 IEEE Computer Society. All rights reserved.

Real-Estate Housing Market Analytics and Prediction Using Big Data for Post Pandemic Era

Big Data has transformed the workings of real estate firms by improving the efficiency, cutting costs and by enhancing decision making. It helps them to become more agile for improved customer satisfaction and experiences. In the past, real estate businesses had to follow traditional methods by following past trends and professional expertise to make major decisions. Big Data has become much easier to access accurate real data, make conclusions and to even predict future prices of properties. This research uses machine learning algorithms for the appraisal of property prices in New York City. The methods are applied to the data sample of about 80,000 properties, which have sufficient information about each property and its demographic aspects. By further analysis and modelling, it is observed that model with Feature Engineering has performed much better that the model in which Random Forest was implemented. The conclusions drawn from the empirical study would be beneficial for real estate agents and people who are looking forward to invest in New York properties and understand the variation of property prices of New York in the post covid era in comparison to the pre covid era. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Factors influencing the satisfaction of chat commerce usage experience in Thailand: A Covid necessitated e-business platform

It is an undoubted fact that Internet, and by extension, e-commerce on the Internet is here to stay. Merchants of all types, big and small, are aiming to find their niche in the e-commerce marketplace, and increase their revenue. Consumer preferences on online shopping and use of new technologies are continually shifting as well. Expansion of e-commerce offerings has significantly increased the number of users and trading volumes of online shopping, therefore highlighting the need to research online consumer purchasing behavior. In the meantime, COVID-19, which forced public lockdowns over the last 2 years, led the consumers to engage in alternative purchasing channels. One of those new channels that was successful due to the increased use of smartphone mobile apps technology is called "conversation commerce”, a.k.a., "chat commerce” or "c-commerce”. In this research, with the use of a web-based survey involving 227 respondents, we investigated into the factors influencing the satisfaction of chat commerce usage experience in Thailand, and focused on their views based on generational age differences among them. This research's objectives were to answer the following 2 research questions: [1] What factors influence the satisfaction of chat commerce usage experience in Thailand?;[2]Do factors influencing the satisfaction of chat commerce usage experience vary among generational age differences? The 10 factors studied in this research, which may lead to the success of chat commerce in Thailand, were: [1] Service Rep's Reliability;[2] Service Rep's Assurance;[3] Service Rep's Responsiveness;[4] Service Rep's Empathy;[5] Perceived Information Quality;[6] Perceived Appropriate Wait Time;[7] Trust in the Platform;[8] Perceived Ease of Use;[9] Perceived Usefulness;[10] Satisfaction with the Experience. The 4 generations in this study were: [1] Baby Boomer;[2] Gen X;[3] Gen Y;[4] Gen Z. The results of this study indicate that all 10 proposed factors ultimately have positive influence on Satisfaction with chat commerce usage experience, and may lead to the success of chat commerce in Thailand, while the 2 most important factors being Assurance [ASS] and Perceived Usefulness [PUS]. This was true for ASS for 3 of the generations (Baby Boomer, Gen X, Gen Z), as well as for the entire dataset;and for PUS for 2 of the generations (Gen Y, Gen Z), as well as the entire dataset. © 2022 International Consortium for Electronic Business. All rights reserved.