Montana State business professor publishes research on social media and customer service agents

BOZEMAN - A professor in Montana State University's Jake Jabs College of Business and Entrepreneurship recently published a paper in a highly regarded academic journal, Production and Operations Management, that explores the influence of social media on customer service.

Huai-Tzu Cheng, a business management professor, was the lead author on the paper, titled "Unveiling the Human Touch: Enhancing Customer Satisfaction Through Personal Profiles of Social Media Customer Service Agents." It was published online in December 2025 in collaboration with Yang Pan at Tulane University and Rudy Hirschheim at Louisiana State University. POM, the journal, is consistently ranked as a top academic publication by the Financial Times, one of the world's most authoritative business and economics newspapers.

The research explores the question of how personalized customer service profiles influence customer behavior compared to standardized profiles. The team ultimately found that personalized profiles can positively influence customer interaction.

To study this, the research team focused on user interactions with profiles of U.S. telecom giant T-Mobile on the social platform X, formerly Twitter. In February 2017, Twitter introduced a new feature allowing companies to create personal profiles for customer service agents that included profile photos, names, personal interests and biographies - leading to a more "human touch" that inspired the paper's title. Before this new feature, customers interacting with T-Mobile Help accounts on Twitter could only see the company logo and the initials or name of the customer service agent.

Cheng analyzed how customers interacted with T-Mobile Help's profiles three months before and three months after the shift and then compared those interactions with those of other telecom company help profiles - AT&T Cares, Verizon Support and Spring Care - who had not yet implemented personalized changes in that time frame. Overall, the analysis found that personalized customer service profiles increased positive sentiment in customer posts on X, reduced the likelihood of complaints and improved customer satisfaction. However, researchers noted the personalized profiles created heightened expectations for timely responses, meaning that delays in response time were more detrimental than with standardized profiles. This finding was a "surprising and critical nuance," Cheng said.

Another notable finding, Cheng said, is that while "humanization" drives customers to express gratitude, it does not directly drive satisfaction, which is instead driven by "perceived warmth" and "perceived competence."

"This suggests that simply seeming human isn't enough for satisfaction," Cheng said. "The agent must also seem warm and capable."

These findings will be most useful to businesspeople managing customer service operations on social media or digital platforms, and also to e-service platforms such as X that can gain value by strengthening their features for agent personalization, Cheng said.

People can draw important insights from the research, she added. For one, personalization is a cost-effective strategy for companies to improve profile metrics and customer satisfaction. She identified the shift as "cost-neutral," meaning that it can use existing customer service staff and requires no specialized training. Additionally, the findings have applicability to artificial intelligence chatbots, indicating that adding humanizing elements to such bots can bolster user connection and trust.

Cheng also identified pathways for future research, which had a narrow scope confined to X and telecom companies. Future research could ask whether these findings hold true on other platforms with different user cultures and interfaces, such as Facebook, Instagram or TikTok, and if they hold true in other industries such as banking, health care or retail.

Finally, researchers could ask if a "virtual agent" or avatar can achieve the same positive personalization results as a real photo, identifying if the benefits of social presence can be simulated artificially, Cheng suggested.

"This work is exactly the kind of expert analysis that generates findings useful for our industry partners," said Brian Gillespie, dean of the business college. "The publication shows our students the high caliber of research at MSU and diversity of interests of our faculty. Congratulations to Huai on this significant achievement in her career."

To learn more, people can access the paper at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10591478251388172.