Article Preview
Top1. Introduction
In recent years, China has seen a boom of hotel demand and a double-digit growth of the number of hotels. Overall, customers are quite satisfied with hotel services. However, some indices of customer satisfaction remain at a low level all year round (Jointwisdom, 2020). What is worse, there is a declining trend in the recognition of hotels in more than half cities and provinces across the country (China Hospitality Association, 2019). This raises three important questions: Are the current index systems for customer satisfaction scientific and reasonable? Are the evaluation processes and methods scientific? Are the evaluation results objective enough to reflect the reality? These questions became even more important after the outbreak of the COVID-19. Scientific methods and techniques should be adopted to understand the subjective needs of customers, improve service quality, and fully manage customer satisfaction.
Satisfaction is the key to the competitive advantage of a hotel. Amid fierce market competition, the hotel should make customer satisfaction its top priority. Customer satisfaction measurement and evaluation is the principal tool by which marketers assess the health of their relationships with their customers (Rossomme, 2003). The aim of measuring and evaluating customer satisfaction is to assess the quality of existing management practices and suggest directions for improvement (Gilbert & Horsnell, 1998). Traditionally, customer satisfaction is measured and evaluated through quantitative statistics and structural equation modeling (SEM), based on the data collected from questionnaire survey, interview, and case study. This traditional strategy consumes lots of time and manpower, and yet outputs information of poor quality (Decker & Trusov, 2010; Groves, 2006). Under this strategy, the measurement and evaluation are basically static, focusing on one or several time points or periods. To make matters worse, the relevant evaluation researches emphasize the indices of customer satisfaction over those of customers before and after the purchase, and lack comparative analysis on customer satisfaction of competing enterprises.
Online reviews are the real feelings expressed by hotel customers after consuming and experiencing products and services. They are often considered as spontaneous and insightful feedbacks from customers. These free or low-cost feedbacks can be obtained anytime, anywhere (Guo et al., 2017). Moreover, online reviews have good dynamic features due to their time tags. Based on online reviews of hotel customers, it is possible to set up a complete index system involving pre-purchase indices (e.g., expectation), in-purchase indices (e.g., satisfaction and service quality), and post-purchase indices (e.g., complaint), revealing the spatial and temporal dynamics of customer satisfaction.
Through the above analysis, this paper proposes a dynamic measurement and evaluation framework and its specific methods for hotel customer satisfaction through sentiment analysis on online reviews. The dynamic measurement and evaluation were realized based on a self-designed scientific index system for customer satisfaction. The feasibility of our framework was proved through case study.