Let Me Count the Words

Abstract

Customer surveys and comment cards are all well and good, but the best way to gain a full understanding of a customer’s feelings about a hotel is to analyze the context of the customer’s comments. Heretofore a laborious process, qualitative data analysis is rapidly becoming feasible for hoteliers, using software applications that support content analysis and data linking and those that offer advanced linguistic analysis. The content-analysis applications allow an analyst to assess the number of times a customer uses a particular word or phrase in written material or transcribed remarks. By counting the frequency ofwords and noting the association of certain words, one can categorize themes and concepts. By thus “quantifying” the qualitative communication, an analyst can associate the resulting information with demographic or other quantitative data. A more sophisticated analysis is possible with linguistic analysis, which examines the semantics, syntax, and context of customers’ verbal communications. Linguistic analysis applications help the analyst identify the key ideas in a text, gain an indication of the relative importance of each idea, and then develop a prediction of a customer’s behavior based on the context of the remarks. Thus, unlike the typical five-point customer survey, the resulting analysis gives a strong indication of a customer’s emotional connection to a particular hotel.

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