Service Quality in Rail Systems: Listen to the Voice of Social Media

Abstract

Abstract Service quality is essential to increase and maintain users’ loyalty to the railway system. In the literature, surveys have been used to measure the satisfaction of users, and statistical and mathematical methods have been applied to quantify the survey results. In recent years, user-generated contents, including comments and complaints shared via social media, have been used to measure the quality of rail services. These contents may provide important insights into the quality of the service provided with its dynamic structure. In this study, a SERVQUAL-based social media analytics approach is used to measure railway service quality, paying special emphasis on the temporal variations in a national rail system. Topic modeling was used to assign each content to the relevant service dimension and sentiment analysis was applied to measure the level of satisfaction. Importance-performance analysis was employed at the final stage to generate clear policy suggestions. Gathering more than 2.3 million social media messages posted from 2011 to 2021, we examined the temporal evolution of service quality of the Turkish rail system from users’ points of view. The results revealed the most and least important services for passengers and the satisfaction level of each dimension. The differences between the priorities of conventional and high-speed rail passengers were defined and policy recommendations were presented.

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