Evaluating Technique for Capturing Customer Satisfaction Data in Retail Supply Chain

Abstract

Customer satisfaction data plays an important role in understanding the performance, resilience and sustainability of a supply chain network. Although several techniques exist for gathering this type of data, they are mostly not suitable for physical retail stores. The main drawbacks are that the existing methods for capturing customer satisfaction data are not scalable across several retail stores locations, expensive and impractical to implement across several retail stores. This study addresses this gap by evaluating social media sources and review websites as potential sources for gathering customer satisfaction with retail stores in focus. The result of this study shows the most suitable external sources for collecting customer satisfaction data in retail. Furthermore, this study developed a method for collecting a large amount of customer satisfaction data using the web-scraping technique. The result of the data acquisition is presented as a class diagram showing the categories of data collected and their relationships to customer satisfaction. Finally, initial exploration reports of the customer satisfaction data are presented as well, showing the average satisfaction level for the selected case study across different locations and regions in Austria.