Mutual Disclosures and Content Intimacy in Customer Group Engagement: Evidence from Online Chat Groups

Online chat groups (OCGs) are an emerging communication channel, situated between public platforms and private live chats, to engage a group of users who exchange information by instant messages in group conversations. Our paper investigates the role of information disclosure in this setting. We consider two types of disclosures, self-disclosure and reverse-disclosure, which we refer to as mutual disclosures in user dialogs, and investigate the effects of mutual disclosures on focal users’ subsequent engagement in terms of emotions and efforts. Moreover, we examine the intimacy levels of disclosure content and explore the interplay of mutual disclosures regarding content intimacy consistency. Using data from a retailer who organizes customer services via OCGs, our findings reveal how mutual disclosures affect user engagement through the mechanism of liking and uncover multifaceted influences from content intimacy consistency between mutual disclosures. The results are also verified by a controlled experiment and a series of robustness tests. This study extends our understanding of how personal information exchange in online group conversations affects user engagement. Our fine-grained analysis of disclosure interactions provides clear guidance for firms to strategically manage customer relationships through OCGs and shed new light on conversational commerce.