Social media as a main source of customer feedback: alternative to customer satisfaction surveys

Customer satisfaction surveys, which have been the most common way of gauging customer feedback, involve high costs, require customer active participation, and typically involve low response rates. The tremendous growth of social media platforms such as Twitter provides businesses an opportunity to continuously gather and analyze customer feedback, with the goal of identifying and rectifying issues. This paper examines the alternative of replacing traditional customer satisfaction surveys with social media data. To evaluate this approach the following steps were taken, using customer feedback data extracted from Twitter: 1) Applying sentiment to each Tweet to compare the overall sentiment across different products and/or services. 2) Constructing a hashtag cooccurrence network to further optimize the customer feedback query process from Twitter. 3) Comparing customer feedback from survey responses with social media feedback, while considering content and added value. We find that social media provides advantages over traditional surveys.