Deeper insight through social media analysis
August 27, 2019
Continuous improvement of service quality and passenger satisfaction is crucial for airports to give passengers the best experience. For this to happen, airports need to know and understand every angle of their passengers to be able to react on issues and requests regarding the airport. As a lot of passenger behavior is on digital platforms today, it is critical to go there to understand them where they are.
Today many airports to a large extend gather data on service quality and passenger satisfaction through traditional surveys like ASQ (Airport Service Quality). However, with the advent of the internet and the growing digital presence everywhere, it is important to go beyond the traditional surveys and make use of the online information that typically adds a new perspective. With social media analysis it is possible to gather information from the passengers in a new and different way, which uses user-generated content from social media and blogs to collect data.
Social media platforms and blogs used to get broader information
Social media analysis uses data from social media platforms and blogs like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to gather broad information about what individuals have posted about specific areas of interest. Airport specific websites as Skytrax where airports and airlines are rated by the travelers, could contain a lot of information that would not see the light in the airports without social media analysis. Other websites like hotels.com and booking.com can be used to gather information about passengers’ travel behavior. All kinds of websites with user-generated content can be used. At any time, when a person is commenting, liking or even watching a video on YouTube, they provide inputs to the data that could be gathered and analyzed. Data like this could be used to make better business decisions to improve airport experiences.
User-generated content supports better business decisions
As surveys in the airports are costly e.g. with interviewers getting through security and takes time from the passengers, social media analysis could be a more comprehensive complementary analysis to the traditional surveys. The user-generated content can contain important information that would not be gathered through traditional surveys. Also, user generated content enables deeper insight into passengers’ emotional levels to target the decisions in the airport. When the airport gets to know the passengers better, they can use it as a competitive advantage, for improvements or learn from customers to find effective solutions of problems from airport perspective. Possible outcomes could be inputs to drive positive attitudes towards the airport, understanding of trending topics and a way to find key influencers. These new perspectives can give insights to improve the passengers experience in the airport.
Use customized analyses for the specific area of interest
To analyze and make sense of these new types of data sources, new methods must be applied. Text Analytics covers a wide range of techniques from the field of Natural Language Processing that, put short, allows you to quantify and make sense of unstructured text data so that you can improve e.g. quality and satisfaction in the airport. Specific analysis could be sentiment analysis and key phrases. Epinion’s Social Media Analysis helps you analyze social media data about your products, services, markets, campaigns, employees and partners. The approach will be customized the specific area of interest for each airport. The analysis is based on open external and internal sources. Epinion thus delivers social media analysis based on different sources, enabling us to provide airports with deep-dive insights to build upon common survey knowledge.
