Key topics and trends in customer satisfaction research, highlighting its interdisciplinary nature and providing insights for tourism and hospitality industries.
Authors
Robin Nunkoo, Department of Management, University of Mauritius, Reduit, Mauritius; School of Tourism and Hospitality, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa; College of Hotel and Tourism Management, Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Republic of Korea and School of Hospitality, Tourism and Events and Centre for Research and Innovation in Tourism (CRiT), Taylor’s University, Selangor, Malaysia
Anuj Sharma, Professor, Information Systems and Analytics Area, Jindal Global Business School, O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, India
Kevin Kam Fung So, The White Lodging-J.W. Marriott, Jr. School of Hospitality and Tourism Management, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA
Hongyan Hu, The White Lodging-J.W. Marriott, Jr. School of Hospitality and Tourism Management, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA
Adel Fahaf Alrasheedi, Department of Statistics and Operations Research, College of Science, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Summary
Purpose: This paper aims to review two decades of research on customer satisfaction to identify key topics, their prevalence and changes in each topic’s relative popularity over time. It also addresses interdisciplinarity in customer satisfaction studies.
Design/methodology/approach: The data set comprises 1,316 journal articles published between 2000 and 2023. The authors used structural topic modeling to extract defining themes in customer satisfaction research. The authors also analyzed the references cited in these sources to assess studies’ interdisciplinarity.
Findings: The analysis revealed 10 conceptually distinct topics with varying degrees of prevalence and evolutionary paths. The authors noted that numerous academic disciplines, such as general business, marketing, psychology, information systems and statistics, have influenced customer satisfaction research.
Practical implications: This study’s findings provide valuable insights for the tourism and hospitality industries. Practitioners can refer to the results to understand trends in consumer behavior. For example, emerging topics such as transformative service suggest that issues of well-being should be considered when designing tourism and hospitality products.
Originality/value: Using structural topic modeling, the authors extracted unbiased research topics from a larger data set compared with prior reviews and tracked topics’ evolution. In addition, the authors found evidence of how various fields have shaped customer satisfaction research. This study applies a fresh approach to theory development and examines previously intractable research problems. The results point to questions that merit investigation.
Published in: International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management
To read the full article, please click here.
