Psych Central News
Commerce Websites Use Social Media to Build Loyalty
Researchers use the term “swift guanxi” to describe the effort to facilitate loyalty, interactivity and repeat transactions.
Guanxi is a Chinese concept “broadly defined as a close and pervasive interpersonal relationship” and “based on high-quality social interactions and the reciprocal exchange of mutual benefits,” say researchers Carol Xiaojuan Ou, Paul A. Pavlou and Robert M. Davison.
The researchers studied data from TaoBao, China’s leading online marketplace, to examine the efficacy of using computer-mediated-communication (CMC) technology to build guanxi and turn impersonal one-time shoppers into loyal and committed long-term customers through personal rapport.
In the past, online shoppers have been presumed to prefer impersonal transactions, but their study argues that both retailers and customers inherently desire the kind of relationship that can be called guanxi, even if the degree and extent of communication varies by culture.
For example, in China, communication before a transaction of a few dollars could take more than 45 minutes.
“Nobody would argue that personal relationships are unimportant, but it is unfathomable that people in the U.S. would engage in such extensive communications and personal interactions for a small transaction,” said Pavlou.
The instant messaging technology used on TaoBao allows buyers and sellers to interact immediately and to use emoticons and avatars in the negotiation and verification of the transaction details.
In addition, all the customers’ messages related to a specific product are shown in a message box. Finally, the feedback system provides users with textual and numerical evaluations of buyers and sellers that further establish rapport.
“The role of CMC tools in establishing swift guanxi via interactivity, presence, and trust, suggests that buyer-seller interaction can easily and quickly transform strangers into acquaintances,” the researchers wrote.
“In terms of repeat transactions, the effective use of CMC tools creates a significant opportunity for online sellers who wish to reinforce swift guanxi with buyers via building buyers’ trust.”
With the use of CMC tools (such as instant messaging, message boxes and feedback), TaoBao has achieved a loyalty rate, or “stickiness,” of 71.3 percent of its customer base – the kind of loyalty that is typically associated with only brick-and-mortar retailers.
Guanxi, largely enabled by CMC tools, can help explain the success of Taobao in China despite eBay’s attempts to capture China’s online market with eBay China (EachNet). Currently Taobao has 96 percent market share in China compared to 0.1 percent for EachNet.
Pavlou explained the significance of the study’s findings by citing an April 2000 article in The Economist that said: “If you don’t have the patience to learn about guanxi, old boy, you might as well pack your bags and go home.”
“This study validates this warning by showing the ability of social technologies to transform online marketplaces from impersonal transactions among strangers to personal relationships among virtual friends,” Pavlou said.
“The future of electronic commerce lies in personal relationships virtually enabled by social technologies.”
The study is published online in MIS Quarterly.
Source: Temple University
Can Software Actually Help Improve Your Social Skills?
Experts say that social phobias affect about 15 million adults in the United States with public speaking high on the list of such phobias.
In some cases, fears of social situations can be especially acute. For example, individuals with Asperger’s syndrome often have difficulty making eye contact and reacting appropriately to social cues.
But with appropriate training, such difficulties can often be overcome.
MIT researchers developed the software to help people practice their interpersonal skills until they feel more comfortable with situations such as a job interview or a first date.
The software, called MACH (short for My Automated Conversation coacH), uses a computer-generated onscreen face, along with facial, speech and behavior analysis and synthesis software, to simulate face-to-face conversations. It then provides users with feedback on their interactions.
The research was led by MIT Media Lab doctoral student M. Ehsan Hoque, who says the work could be helpful to a wide range of people.
“Interpersonal skills are the key to being successful at work and at home,” Hoque says. “How we appear and how we convey our feelings to others define us. But there isn’t much help out there to improve on that segment of interaction.”
Many people with social phobias, Hoque says, want “the possibility of having some kind of automated system so that they can practice social interactions in their own environment. … They desire to control the pace of the interaction, practice as many times as they wish, and own their data.”
The MACH software offers all those features, Hoque says. In fact, in randomized tests with 90 MIT juniors who volunteered for the research, the software showed its value.
First, the test subjects — all of whom were native speakers of English — were randomly divided into three groups. Each group participated in two simulated job interviews, a week apart, with MIT career counselors.
In between the two interviews (and unknown to the counselors), the students received help. One group watched videos of interview advice, while a second group had a practice session with the MACH-simulated interviewer but received no feedback other than a video of their own performance.
Finally, a third group used MACH and then saw videos of themselves accompanied by an analysis of such measures as how much they smiled, how well they maintained eye contact, how well they modulated their voices and how often they used filler words such as “like,” “basically” and “umm.”
Evaluations by another group of career counselors showed that the third group demonstrated statistically significant improvement on measures including “appears excited about the job,” “overall performance,” and “would you recommend hiring this person?”
In all of these categories, by comparison, there was no significant change for the other two groups.
The software behind these improvements was developed over two years as part of Hoque’s doctoral thesis work.
Designed to run on an ordinary laptop, the system uses the computer’s webcam to monitor a user’s facial expressions and movements, and its microphone to capture the subject’s speech.
The MACH system then analyzes the user’s smiles, head gestures, speech volume and speed and use of filler words, among other things. The automated interviewer — a life-size, three-dimensional simulated face — can smile and nod in response to the subject’s speech and motions, ask questions and give responses.
While this initial implementation was focused on helping job candidates, Hoque says training with the software could be helpful in many kinds of social interactions.
Source: MIT
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