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Improving customer satisfaction in the hotel industry by fusing multi-source user-generated content: An integration method based on the heuristic-systematic model and evidence theory

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Abstract

Improving customer satisfaction is the key factor in enhancing the core competitiveness of hotels, as higher customer satisfaction can lead to long-term benefits such as a positive reputation, customer loyalty, and sustained profitability. Multi-source user-generated content (UGC) can provide high-quality and sufficient information for improving customer satisfaction; however, related research is limited. Therefore, a method considering multi-source UGC to improve customer satisfaction is proposed in this paper. First, the service attributes of the hotels that customers care about are obtained from multi-source UGC. Then, evaluation information is obtained by processing multi-source UGC based on the heuristic-systematic model, and the credibility of the evaluation information is measured. Furthermore, evaluation information is combined based on evidence theory to estimate the importance and performance of hotel service attributes. Finally, impact asymmetry-gap analysis (IAGA) is proposed to generate customer satisfaction improvement strategies for different attributes. The application of the method is illustrated using data from actual hotels.

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Data availability and access

The datasets analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Funding

This work was supported by Scientific Research Project of Liaoning Provincial Department of Education (Project No. LJKMR20220419).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Business School, Economics Faculty, Liaoning University, Shenyang, 110136, China

    Yu-Mei Ma & Ming-Yang Li

  2. Department of Basic Teaching and Research, Criminal Investigation Police University of China, Shenyang, 110854, China

    **-** Cao

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  1. Yu-Mei Ma
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  2. Ming-Yang Li
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  3. **-** Cao
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design.The first draft of the manuscript was written by Yu-Mei Ma and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Ming-Yang Li.

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Ma, YM., Li, MY. & Cao, PP. Improving customer satisfaction in the hotel industry by fusing multi-source user-generated content: An integration method based on the heuristic-systematic model and evidence theory. Appl Intell (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489-024-05621-9

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