Framework for Sentiment-Driven Evaluation of Customer Satisfaction With Cosmetics Brands

Jaehun Park

doi:10.1109/access.2020.2997522

Abstract

Cosmetics brand managers' efforts in monitoring customer satisfaction and service quality have suffered due to the lack of effective analysis methods. In order to derive more comprehensive and objective insights into customer opinions on product quality and preferences for cosmetics brands, this study derived an online-review-based process for evaluation of customer satisfaction. The present study developed a systematic approach to the evaluation of relative customer satisfaction with cosmetics brands via sentiment analysis and statistical data analysis, and interpreted the determinants of positive and negative opinions via Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) analysis. To illustrate the efficacy and applicability of the proposed approach, an empirical case study applying it to the global top 26 cosmetics brands was conducted, which evaluated relative customer satisfaction with brands and examined the main causes of positive and negative opinions. The proposed approach is expected to be employed by cosmetics companies to realize or improve satisfaction with the brands that customers evaluate. Furthermore, we hope that it can be used as a source of fundamental data that could be applied to efforts to improve both brand competitiveness and provision of systematic services.

Highlights

Achieving high product and service quality together with high customer satisfaction is a fundamental duty of a business manager in continuously developing business opportunities and running day-to-day operations in a competitive environment
We show how to evaluate the customer satisfaction of cosmetics brands from a probabilistic point of view using the results of the sentiment analysis, and provide any interpretation of the determinants of customer opinions on products and services that have not been performed in the previous studies
According to the sentiment analysis on the global 26 cosmetics brands, the average positive, negative and neutral opinions were 35, 10, and 55%, respectively, and we found that the positive opinion ratio was higher than the negative opinion ratio for most brands

Summary

Introduction

Achieving high product and service quality together with high customer satisfaction is a fundamental duty of a business manager in continuously developing business opportunities and running day-to-day operations in a competitive environment. Customer satisfaction affecting a company’s profits is a result of service quality management. Advances in online and mobile technologies have created new consumption patterns for consumers These technologies have expanded product distribution (which had been limited to the offline realm) to the online world of internet commerce (e-commerce). A typical form of online WOM is online customer reviews, which are peer-generated product or service evaluations including personal opinions or sentiments that are posted on a company’s or third-party website [31]. Since online reviews can share information about various products with many customers beyond space and time, they can have a stronger influence on purchasing decisions and product images than offline WOM [32]. On the customers’ side, online reviews can be used to support purchasing decisions, and on the product providers’ side, they can be utilized to understand customers’ current preferences and be applied for product improvement, marketing, and customer relationship management [34]

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