Improving Services Offered by Internet Providers by Analyzing Online Reviews using Text Analytics

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 to ensure continued growth. As 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 each ISP 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 proposed 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.