Using a Text Mining Approach to Hear Voices of Customers from Social Media toward the Fast-Food Restaurant Industry
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The paper aims at understanding the perceptions of the service of the restaurant during Covid-19 outbreak. I think the paper is well written and tackles an important and actual aspect.
The literature review is clear and well written. The date processing method is also clear.
My biggest concern is related to the fact if the manuscript might fit or not in sustainability journal as it publish "studies related to sustainability and sustainable development".
Moreover, I think would be necessary to better explain the results related to customer satisfaction during Covid-19 outbreak as it was the primary aim of the manuscript. At present time those aspects are just marginally presented with few lines in the conclusions.
Another minor issue: perhaps figure 1 can be blurred in some parts to respect privacy issues.
Author Response
Thank you for your comments regarding the submitted paper. The following corrections have been made according to your suggestions. All correction parts have been marked in red color. Please check the revised manuscript.
Reviewer 1.
Comment #1 The paper aims at understanding the perceptions of the service of the restaurant during Covid-19 outbreak. I think the paper is well written and tackles an important and actual aspect. The literature review is clear and well written. The date processing method is also clear.
Response:
Thanks a lot for your valuable comments.
Comment #2 My biggest concern is related to the fact if the manuscript might fit or not in sustainability journal as it publishes "studies related to sustainability and sustainable development".
Response:
Customer satisfaction has always been one of the key factors for the sustainable development of enterprises. During the epidemic, physical sales has dropped significantly. The main purpose of this study is to explore whether customer voices will be different during the COVID-19 outbreak. Results can help companies to properly adapt to similar epidemic situations in the future and facilitate their sustainable development. Therefore, this study is indeed related to sustainability and sustainable development for enterprises.
We also made some corrections in abstract and introduction. They also could be found as below.
Abstract:
“Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the sales of fast-food business have dropped sharply. Customer satisfaction has always been one of the key factors for the sustainable development of enterprises. But, in fast-food restaurant business, to know customer satisfaction is one of 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 will be different during the COVID-19 outbreak from social media reviews and 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) will be presented to discover the essential factors for customers to increase their satisfaction from unstructured online customer reviews. Finally, three real world review sets have been 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.”
Comment #3 Moreover, I think would be necessary to better explain the results related to customer satisfaction during Covid-19 outbreak as it was the primary aim of the manuscript. At present time those aspects are just marginally presented with few lines in the conclusions.
Response:
We have enhanced the discussion related to customer satisfaction during COVID-19 in section 5. We added some descriptions. Please check the red-marked parts in Pages13~14. The main additional paragraph could be found as below.
“This study collects reviews during the outbreak period to discover the key factors affecting customer satisfaction. We can see from the frequency of keywords mentioned in Table 2. Compared with the normal period, during the epidemic period, customers obviously pay more attention to safety protection. This can be seen from the increase in the frequency of mentioning words such as COVID, mask, corona, and so on. However, as in normal period, customers still care about basic satisfaction factors such as the food and service quality. In addition, from the decision tree diagram shown in Figure 3, sentiment of a review obviously has a significant impact on customer satisfaction. Due to the remarkable influence of eWOM on social media, in addition to taking into account the quality of basic products and services, fast-food businesses still need to be more careful in handling negative sentimental comments in the community.”
Comment #4 Another minor issue: perhaps figure 1 can be blurred in some parts to respect privacy issues.
Response:
We have removed the account name in Figure 1. Please check figure 1 in page 7.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors present a very topical issue of customer satisfaction which is becoming more critical in the context of the deteriorating economic situation, reflecting the reduction in sales due to the current Covid-19 pandemic. I enjoyed reviewing this manuscript and appreciate the application of the data mining method that together with LASSO provides a powerful tool in this research. Research results are clearly and carefully introduced. In addition, I like the final part of the manuscript with a clear summary of results and their benefits in the fast-food industry.
However, the following suggestions were made to improve this paper.
Abstract:
- I would recommend to shorten the abstract, some of its parts definitely belong to the introductory part.
- State clearly the main goal of your article.
Introduction
- Extend the section discussing the eWOM as this is crucial for your topic.
- Provide more theoretical background to LASSO resulting from your literary research.
Results
- Under Table 4, you wrote that the presented results were also confirmed by DT results. Maybe you could present them in a form of a DT diagram.
Language
- It is suggested to review the language (vocabulary choice) and to remove contractions so that all readers can read the text without any difficulties.
- In conclusion, you wrote: “Online customer reviews are also can cut costs and time in doing research.“ – This is illogical.
Author Response
Thank you for your comments regarding the submitted paper. The following corrections have been made according to your suggestions. All correction parts have been marked in red color. Please check the revised manuscript.
Reviewer #2:
Comment #1
The authors present a very topical issue of customer satisfaction which is becoming more critical in the context of the deteriorating economic situation, reflecting the reduction in sales due to the current Covid-19 pandemic. I enjoyed reviewing this manuscript and appreciate the application of the data mining method that together with LASSO provides a powerful tool in this research. Research results are clearly and carefully introduced. In addition, I like the final part of the manuscript with a clear summary of results and their benefits in the fast-food industry.
However, the following suggestions were made to improve this paper.
Response:
Thanks for your valuable comments. All comments have been fully considered in the revised manuscript.
Comment #2 Abstract:
- I would recommend to shorten the abstract, some of its parts definitely belong to the introductory part.
- State clearly the main goal of your article.
Response:
- Thanks for your valuable comments. We have shortened the abstract and move some parts to introduction section. In abstract, the number of using words has been reduced from 276 to 175.
- Moreover, in order to state clearly the main goal, we already enhanced the description of the main goal of this study in abstract. Please check the abstract part in page 1.
Comment #3. Introduction
- Extend the section discussing the eWOM as this is crucial for your topic.
- Provide more theoretical background to LASSO resulting from your literary research.
Response:
- We have extended the related statements regarding e-WOM. Please check the parts marked in red (Page 2). Related statements could be found as below.
“Moreover, electronic Word-of-Mouth (eWOM) is becoming more and more important [9], but we seldom understand the opinions of community users in time.
Customers often express their personal opinions regarding service experiences. In social media, consumer text comments (eWOM) can reflect customers’ true feelings, and also refer to customers’ satisfaction with products, which is of great significance to online marketing [10]. These eWOM will affect other social media users purchase intention, and have become one of important reference sources for customers’ decisions in buying services, accommodations and shopping.
Although online evaluation systems provide consumers with intuitive feedback on products and services, such as star ratings, reviews, sharing, etc., the content of reviews has more valuable information than star ratings or sharing [11, 12]. Vásquez [13] pointed out that negative reviews include some verbal behaviors of consumers towards the industry, which include positive discussions, expectations, suggestions, content improvements and warnings. Since customers in the catering industry often read other customers’ reviews, they are more likely to view other customers’ reviews as providing more reliable and relevant information, and are more likely to be highly influenced by these review [14]. Consumers’ positive comments motivate other consumers to increase their willingness to purchase products [15], which is also actively pursued by e-commerce vendors. The main reason is that the communication behavior of e-WOM affects the decisions of other consumers [16], which in turn affect market competition trends [17].
In addition, online reviews have the characteristics of communication and global influence, and text reviews reflect the aggressive evaluation of customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Other consumers’ decision-making behaviors are influenced by the e-WOM. Textual reviews can be considered as one of source of voice of customers. ”
2.In addition, we have provided more theoretical background to LASSO in introduction section. Please check the 2nd paragraph in Page 3.
Comment #4. Results
- Under Table 4, you wrote that the presented results were also confirmed by DT results. Maybe you could present them in a form of a DT diagram.
Response:
A DT diagram has been added as Figure 3. Related statements could be found in bottom of page 12.
Comment #5. Language
- It is suggested to review the language (vocabulary choice) and to remove contractions so that all readers can read the text without any difficulties.
- In conclusion, you wrote: “Online customer reviews are also can cut costs and time in doing research.“ – This is illogical.
Response:
- We have carefully reviewed the language to remove contractions. This paper has also been proof read by a native English speaker.
2.The sentence “Online customer reviews are also can cut costs and time in doing research.” has been modified as “Instead of using conventional questionnaire survey methods to collect data, we utilize online customer reviews to be our data source. This way can save some manpower.”
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
All my concerns were addresses.
