Using a Text Mining Approach to Hear Voices of Customers from Social Media toward the Fast-Food Restaurant Industry

Wen-Kuo Chen,Long-Sheng Chen,Dalianus Riantama

doi:10.3390/su13010268

Wen-Kuo Chen, Long-Sheng Chen + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su13010268

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Abstract

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the sales of fast-food businesses have dropped sharply. Customer satisfaction has always been one of the key factors for the sustainable development of enterprises. However, in the fast-food restaurant business, gaining the knowledge of customer satisfaction is one of the critical tasks. Moreover, text reviews in social media have become one of important reference sources for customers’ decisions in buying services and products. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to explore whether customer voices from social media reviews are different during the COVID-19 outbreak and to propose a new method to reduce interpersonal contact when collecting data. A text mining scheme which includes least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) and decision trees (DT) are presented to discover the essential factors for customers to increase their satisfaction from unstructured online customer reviews. Finally, three real world review sets were employed to validate the effectiveness of the presented text mining scheme. Experimental results can help companies to properly adapt to similar epidemic situations in the future and facilitate their sustainable development.

Highlights

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the McDonald’s Corp in 2020 reported that global sales decreased 23.9% in the 2nd quarter [1]
Before implementing least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO), we ranked words in the collected data based on the sum of term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) weights
In addition to strongly related words such as COVID, corona, coronavirus, and mask, customers expressed “missing conventional way of enjoying food” and “order meal by phone”, which could reflect the special situations during theCOVID-19 pandemic

Summary

Introduction

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the McDonald’s Corp in 2020 reported that global sales decreased 23.9% in the 2nd quarter [1]. COVID-19 has led to a dramatic shift in consumer behavior demand away from restaurants, food service, and others towards food consumed at home, requiring some critical changes for restaurants [3,4,5]. Restaurants are required to provide different food services to make their customers satisfied during the COVID-19 outbreak so that when this outbreak is over, those customers will become loyal to the fast-food restaurant due to their previous satisfaction of the service. In the fast-food restaurant business, to gaining knowledge of customer satisfaction is one of the critical tasks. It is important to satisfy customers, since they will order more from the fast-food restaurant, and they will order more after the COVID-19 era

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Conclusion