Use of Social Media to Measure Customer Satisfaction in Public Transit Services

The common approach for collecting customer opinion in public transit systems is to administer customer satisfaction (CSat) surveys. Such surveys are subject to changes, but the main challenge is that the design, collection, and analysis of CSat surveys are expensive and time-consuming tasks. Online social media platforms provide a bi-directional communication channel between customers and organizations, offering more capabilities than the commonly used CSat surveys. For example, online social media provide free accessibility to data and make it feasible to study the dynamics of online discussions. This study analyzes online discussions on Twitter about public transportation services in order to develop a tool which complements transit CSat surveys. The analysis has three analysis components: semantic, social network, and sentiment. The results are compared to those for CSat surveys published by selected Canadian transit agencies to determine whether social media could be used to extrapolate the changes in customer satisfaction.M.A.S