Exploring the Top Customer Concerns Under the COVID-19 Crisis: A Social Media Analytics Study from the Retailer Industry

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a set of government policies and supermarket regulations, which affected customers’ grocery shopping behaviours. However, the specific impact of COVID-19 on retailers at the customer end has not yet been addressed. Customer perception changes towards supermarkets’ response actions are examined by using text-mining techniques together with time series analysis, which reveals the causes of sentiment change in each time series. Drawing on the social media crisis communication framework and Situational Crisis Communication theory, this study also investigates whether responding to a crisis help retail managers to better understand their customer. The results uncover that customer experiencing certain social media interactions may evaluate attributes differently, resulting in varying levels of customer information collection. As new variants of the COVID-19 keep appearing, and the emerging managerial problems put businesses at risk for the next crisis, this study adds sub-dimensions to the categorical dimensions to shed light on how supermarkets meet customers’ demands and improve their service during and after a crisis. Overall, this research reveals how supermarkets could use social media data to better analyse customer behaviour during a pandemic and sustain competitiveness by upgrading their crisis strategies and service provision.

Keywords: - Text-mining, Crisis management, Supermarket retailers