Fall 2017 - Impact of Communication Design on Customer Satisfaction: Insights from Online Courses

Affiliations:
Project Leader:	Unnati Narang unnati@tamu.edu Marketing
Faculty Mentor:	Manjit Yadav, Ph.D.
Meeting Times:	TBD
Team Size:	4 (Team Full)
Open Spots:	0
Special Opportunities:	Opportunity to work with cutting-edge faculty and students from Marketing, Economics, and Statistics On-the-job training in statistical software, such as R Opportunity to work with big data and potentially machine learning at later stages Presenting work at a poster session and potentially to Marketing department faculty and PhD students at Mays Business School If you do well, then letters of recommendation for your future roles (Please note that this role does not offer co-authorship or publication)
Team Needs:	Comfort with MS excel; basic knowledge of Statistics preferred but not necessary. Problem-solving ability, Willingness to learn, Resourcefulness, and Dedication
Description:	“The purpose of the proposed study is to measure and explain the impact of various communication design strategies adopted by online two-sided platforms on customer engagement and satisfaction. In recent years, two-sided platforms, such as Airbnb and Uber that connect two or more sets of participants have grown rapidly and are poised to comprise 30% of the world’s GDP by 2025. As a result, their design and delivery are critical for both companies and customers. Specifically, how a platform designs its communication flows among participants is an important but underexplored issue. In the proposed study, we investigate the effect of communication design strategies on customer engagement and satisfaction. Our overarching argument is that specific communication linkages can have beneficial – and detrimental – implications for value creation in two-sided platforms. Theoretically, the proposed framework advances our understanding of how communication strategies contribute to value creation in these platforms. Our empirical context is Coursera.org (an online course platform), but our theoretical findings have broader applicability to other two-sided platforms. We collect individual-level panel data from Coursera and also plan to conduct a number of field experiments in one of the world’s most popular Coursera courses on Digital Marketing. We apply advanced econometric techniques, such as estimating a system of equations using conditional mixed processing, and difference-in-differences analysis. Our work provides a measurable estimate of the impact of communication design for customer-centric outcomes of a two-sided platform. Learn more by watching the team leader’s video presenting the project at a leading Marketing Conference: https://vimeo.com/204892915”