Article 6 Satisfaction Surveys or Online Sentiment

Question 1

What is being studied?

Answer 1

How traditional customer satisfaction performs compared to eWoM sentiment in predicting future firm performance.

Question 2

Why is this important to study?

Answer 2

Because it contributes to uncovering how best to track and monitor the attitudes and opinions of the customer base.

Question 3

How and where is this research conducted?

Answer 3

Data was gathered from ACSI (survey-based, offline) and from Twitter (qdap R-package, online).

A total of 46 firms, across 11 industries, in 8 years’ time were used.

Question 4

What are the main findings?

Answer 4

• Both survey-based and online sentiment help predict firm performance.
• Combining both predictors can be better than using just one.
• Growth in negative eWoM is the best predictor of future firm performance.

Question 5

What are the limitations?

Answer 5

• Only one source of eWoM is used (Twitter).
• The used year-to-year comparison can be rather unfair. Best would be to also include (in future research) the day-to-day, week-to-week, and month-to-month comparison.