Spillover effects of online social cues: Field evidence from the service industry

Previous research studied the impact of online social cues (i.e., references on websites to persons or social situations) on website perceptions. Here, we study whether online social cues may additionally create a spillover to the physical channel. We propose that online social cues on the website attributed to service employees can strengthen perceived service quality of service employees, and that the strength of this effect is determined by media richness. We test our predictions with multisource data from a sample of 113 service firms, including two samples of customers for each of the firms. We find that the effects of online social cues of service employees are strengthened by the use of rich media, and that online social cues increase customer loyalty through service quality perceptions of service employees but not through service quality perceptions of the website. Thus, the effects of online social cues are underestimated if their spillover to physical channels is neglected.