Improving Service Supply Chain of Internet Services by Analyzing Online Customer Reviews

Abstract

As the service sector is gaining more attention over the past few decades, service supply chains are being widely investigated to improve service quality. Specifically, with the proliferation of digital infrastructure, there is a plethora of demand for internet services, which makes the wireless communications industry highly competitive. Thus, internet service providers (ISPs) must ensure that their efforts are targeted towards attracting and retaining customers for continued growth. Since Web 2.0 has gained traction and more tools have become available, customers in recent times are equipped to make well-informed decisions, specifically due to the colossal information available in online reviews. ISPs can use this information to better understand the views of the customers about their products and services. The goal of this paper is to identify the current strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) of several leading ISPs by exploring consumer reviews using text analytics. The proposed approach consists of four different stages: bigram and trigram analyses, topic identification, SWOT analysis and Root Cause Analysis (RCA). For each ISP, we first categorize online reviews into positive and negative based on customer ratings and then leverage text analytic tools to determine the most frequently used and co-occurring words in each categorization of reviews. Subsequently, looking at the positive and negative topics in each ISP, we conduct the SWOT analysis as well as the RCA to help companies identify the internal and external factors impacting customer satisfaction. We use a case study to illustrate the proposed approach. The managerial insights that are derived from the results can act as a decision support tool for ISPs to offer better products and services for their customers.