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In a competitive market and globalization, satisfying customers is arguably the ultimate concern of organizations. Globalized competition has stressed the importance of quality and satisfaction in the battle for winning consumer preferences and maintaining sustainable competitive advantages. Nowadays, educational systems are becoming service-oriented. In such institution, quality, satisfaction, and performance prove to be the key factors reciprocally interrelated in a cyclical relationship. The higher the service quality, the more satisfied the customers. Thus, to attract new customers, educational institutions and universities are placing greater emphasis on meeting the expectations and needs of their customers, the “students” (Thomas, 2011).
With the advent of information technology (IT), the world has become more hooked to the utilization of the latest IT advancements specifically social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. According to Tiwari & Ghosh (2014), Social Media has become a vital communication tool through which individuals can exercise their right of freedom of expression and exchange information and ideas. On that note, Yankelovich (2013) observed that fostering customer feedback obtained from social media helps build branding. The clients' experiences and feedbacks are helpful information that an organization can utilize to adjust their services provided to fit to the needs of their clients. In addition, using social media platforms, clients can express their opinions/comments freely without any intimidation. Nevertheless, even with a legal provision, some government offices are still seemingly unaware, often neglecting the legal provision calling for the need to improve the efficiency of the services rendered to the public. In fact, in the study of Principe (2009) entitled “Exploring Public Service Improvement Initiative: A Case Study of Citizen’s Charter Implementation in Naga City,” which measured the attitude of staff in the delivery of services based on the standards in their charter (i.e., to greet every senior citizen who comes for service with “Good morning/Good afternoon. What can I do for you?”), showed that in reality not all front liners abide by this simple standard.
Being one of the state universities in the Philippines, Pangasinan State University is mandated to provide advanced instruction in the arts, agricultural and natural sciences as well as in technological and professional fields. Hence, the purpose of the study was to measure customer satisfaction based on the customers’ experiences through their feedbacks/comments posted on an online social media platform by employing association rules pattern recognition approach. Specifically, the study intends to answer the following questions: What are the most common clients' feedback / comments that describe the services provided by the frontline offices of PSU - Urdaneta?; and what are the most common clients’ word pattens that describe the services provided by the frontline offices of PSU - Urdaneta? The researchers employed Machine Learning algorithm utilizing association rules and F-P growth to process the gathered data fetched from Facebook posts and comments.
This paper is organized as follows: Section 1, an introduction on service quality with some definitions on customer satisfaction and sentiment analysis. Section 2 is about the review of related studies. Section 3 is the discussion of methodology employed in the study. Section 4 is the discussion and analysis of results. And section 5 outlines the summary and the future scope of measuring customer satisfaction.