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Exploring customer concerns on service quality under the COVID-19 crisis: A social media analytics study from the retail industry

The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a set of government policies and supermarket regulations, which affects customers' grocery shopping behaviours. However, the specific impact of COVID-19 on retailers at the customer end has not yet been addressed. Using text-mining techniques (i.e., sentiment...

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Autores principales: Li, Xinwei, Xu, Mao, Zeng, Wenjuan, Tse, Ying Kei, Chan, Hing Kai
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9534795/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jretconser.2022.103157
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author Li, Xinwei
Xu, Mao
Zeng, Wenjuan
Tse, Ying Kei
Chan, Hing Kai
author_facet Li, Xinwei
Xu, Mao
Zeng, Wenjuan
Tse, Ying Kei
Chan, Hing Kai
author_sort Li, Xinwei
collection PubMed
description The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a set of government policies and supermarket regulations, which affects customers' grocery shopping behaviours. However, the specific impact of COVID-19 on retailers at the customer end has not yet been addressed. Using text-mining techniques (i.e., sentiment analysis, topic modelling) and time series analysis, we analyse 161,921 tweets from leading UK supermarkets during the first COVID-19 lockdown. The results show the causes of sentiment change in each time series and how customer perception changes according to supermarkets’ response actions. Drawing on the social media crisis communication framework and Situational Crisis Communication theory, this study investigates whether responding to a crisis helps retail managers better understand their customers. The results uncover that customers experiencing certain social media interactions may evaluate attributes differently, resulting in varying levels of customer information collection, and grocery companies could benefit from engaging in social media crisis communication with customers. As new variants of COVID-19 keep appearing, emerging managerial problems put businesses at risk for the next crisis. Based on the results of text-mining analysis of consumer perceptions, this study identifies emerging topics in the UK grocery sector in the context of COVID-19 crisis communication and develop the sub-dimensions of service quality assessment into four categories: physical aspects, reliability, personal interaction, and policies. This study reveals how supermarkets could use social media data to better analyse customer behaviour during a pandemic and sustain competitiveness by upgrading their crisis strategies and service provision. It also sheds light on how future researchers can leverage the power of social media data with multiple text-mining methodologies.
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spelling pubmed-95347952022-10-06 Exploring customer concerns on service quality under the COVID-19 crisis: A social media analytics study from the retail industry Li, Xinwei Xu, Mao Zeng, Wenjuan Tse, Ying Kei Chan, Hing Kai Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services Article The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a set of government policies and supermarket regulations, which affects customers' grocery shopping behaviours. However, the specific impact of COVID-19 on retailers at the customer end has not yet been addressed. Using text-mining techniques (i.e., sentiment analysis, topic modelling) and time series analysis, we analyse 161,921 tweets from leading UK supermarkets during the first COVID-19 lockdown. The results show the causes of sentiment change in each time series and how customer perception changes according to supermarkets’ response actions. Drawing on the social media crisis communication framework and Situational Crisis Communication theory, this study investigates whether responding to a crisis helps retail managers better understand their customers. The results uncover that customers experiencing certain social media interactions may evaluate attributes differently, resulting in varying levels of customer information collection, and grocery companies could benefit from engaging in social media crisis communication with customers. As new variants of COVID-19 keep appearing, emerging managerial problems put businesses at risk for the next crisis. Based on the results of text-mining analysis of consumer perceptions, this study identifies emerging topics in the UK grocery sector in the context of COVID-19 crisis communication and develop the sub-dimensions of service quality assessment into four categories: physical aspects, reliability, personal interaction, and policies. This study reveals how supermarkets could use social media data to better analyse customer behaviour during a pandemic and sustain competitiveness by upgrading their crisis strategies and service provision. It also sheds light on how future researchers can leverage the power of social media data with multiple text-mining methodologies. The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. 2023-01 2022-10-06 /pmc/articles/PMC9534795/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jretconser.2022.103157 Text en © 2022 The Authors Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.
spellingShingle Article
Li, Xinwei
Xu, Mao
Zeng, Wenjuan
Tse, Ying Kei
Chan, Hing Kai
Exploring customer concerns on service quality under the COVID-19 crisis: A social media analytics study from the retail industry
title Exploring customer concerns on service quality under the COVID-19 crisis: A social media analytics study from the retail industry
title_full Exploring customer concerns on service quality under the COVID-19 crisis: A social media analytics study from the retail industry
title_fullStr Exploring customer concerns on service quality under the COVID-19 crisis: A social media analytics study from the retail industry
title_full_unstemmed Exploring customer concerns on service quality under the COVID-19 crisis: A social media analytics study from the retail industry
title_short Exploring customer concerns on service quality under the COVID-19 crisis: A social media analytics study from the retail industry
title_sort exploring customer concerns on service quality under the covid-19 crisis: a social media analytics study from the retail industry
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9534795/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jretconser.2022.103157
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