Openness Always Pays Off: Investigation of Diverse Actions in Response Strategies to Data Breaches

Data breaches have become a daily problem and cause immense damage to the affected companies in their customer relationship with the impacted customers. Research has shown that this effect can be positively influenced by applying response strategies. Our study focuses on three main actions that can be identified from data breach response strategies: an apology for the incident, the visibility of the CEO, and high readability of the message. To investigate the impact on transnational and cumulative customer satisfaction, a scenario-based experiment was conducted with 567 participants. Our results show that all three actions have a strong positive effect on transaction satisfaction. Moreover, these response actions have a positive effect on cumulative satisfaction, although the effects are not as strong. Finally, the results are discussed in the context of justice theory and situational crisis communication theory, and practical implications, limitations, and possible future research options are derived.