The continuing growth of service failures, along with the rise of complaints on social media, emphasize the importance of providing effective response strategies. This study aimed to explore the expected outcomes of businesses in responding to customers' complaints on social media and examined the effects of different response strategies (i.e., response type and tone of voice) as well as the role of emotions embedded in complaints. We adopted a mixed-method approach, two qualitative studies followed by a quantitative study. By interviewing companies, we identified a new phenomenon in complaints handling management, firms’ prioritized motives in responding to online complaints is no longer to satisfy the complainants but to gain the observers’ high evaluations toward companies’ online reputation. The result of first study also revealed one of the antecedents of online reputation, the quality of response, which mediates the relationship between response type and online reputation. The second study was approached in an opposite perspective, by interviewing online shoppers, who roles as observers and potential customers in the complaint-response context, measurement scale of the new construct explored in the first study, the response quality, was developed. The last study, the experimental study, was conducted to test and confirm results of the first two studies. The results indicate that emotions embedded in complaints moderate the relationship of response tone of voice and response quality while response quality plays a mediating role in the positive relationship between response type and online reputation. This study suggests firms’ managers to take emotions embedded in complaints into consideration as well as the important role of response quality when responding to online complaints. With the results in practice context, the study also contributes to the service recovery literature in providing “online reputation” as the most concerned motives in online complaints management.

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