Insight into consumer experience on UK train transportation services

Abstract

Customers’ experiences are significant in a rapidly changing service context, and this is shaped by the quality of service provided. With social media changing the way consumers engage with service providers, experiences are shared online. This study carried out three analyses of brand-related conversations on Twitter with the aim of exploring consumers’ attitudes to and experiences of train operating companies. Firstly, Python was used for the tweet mining and sentiment analysis (n = 1,914,494 tweets) to investigate the polarity between the opinions of commuters. Secondly, tweets were thematically analysed and grouped to understand how consumers experience the service quality. Lastly, content analysis of the tweets was carried out to identify the variations in service quality. Results indicated that there is overall positive customer experience, however, there are variations in service quality dimension across the different train groups, highlight the need to improve service quality at different touchpoints, especially the tangible features of the trains and presence of responsive and emphatic staff. This study further broadens the context of customer experience through eWOM on social media for service brands, contribute towards related literature on sentiment analysis and service brands, providing significant theoretical and practical implications for researchers and managers.