User-Generated content mining: Exploring paths on the Quality perspective

The user-generated content are all the publications made available by online users in platforms. They can offer advantages to the companies because they can obtain feedback directly from the customers and improve specification attributes of the product or service features. Hereupon, since demands for reliable service, delivery and short answering times significantly increased, there is an enormous need for improvement in the quality of the products and services provided.

One can define quality, as being the service characteristics, which correspond exactly to what customers need, require and expect, i.e., the attention given to the specification conformity, what makes the company to adopt different approaches to obtain information with direct contact with the customer. Considering that the digital platform encompasses the daily communication between customers and companies, it is important to analyse the user-generated content, such as comments, suggestions, ratings, criticism, especially in the tourism and hospitality industry (the majority of evaluation platforms).

The specific goals of this research, consist in analysing and studying the data obtained from the digital platform “Booking”, where the customers hold the possibility to evaluate the services provided, with comments, to reveal important information in the field of quality, and how that information can be used to improve the performance and the decisions made by the company to obtain competitive advantage.

To reach the proposed goals, a bibliographic analysis was carried out in which it was possible to analyse the maximum information, that exist about this topic.

 User-Generated Content, Quality, Text Mining, Booking.