Using social influence for motivating customers to generate and share feedback

Abstract

A combination of high tech environments and social influence concepts holds great potential to positively effect behaviors and attitudes of individuals. Drawing upon socio-psychological theories, this study explores how social influence design principles change customer engagement in sharing feedback. For that purpose, an information system consisting of social influence design principles was implemented on situated displays and examined with 77 Twitter users. The results reveal interplay between the design principles and their capacity to explain 52% of the variance in perceived persuasiveness of the system, which can further predict 40% of the variance in behavioral intention of participants to provide feedback through the system in the future. The findings could be instrumental in progress towards a richer understanding of how to further harness social influence for customer engagement through socio-technical environments and how it effects the development of novel persuasive systems. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.