Incorporating Crowdsourced Social Media Footprint in Delhi Metro’s Service Quality Assessment

Abstract

In today’s competitive environment, assessing service quality has emerged as a strategic instrument for enhancing efficiency and persuading users to opt for the service. But the service provider’s challenge is ascertaining the commuter perception, especially on qualitative aspects of perceived service quality. In public transport, a comprehensive service quality assessment (SQA) framework has proven effective in assessing service performance when ‘commuter perception’ is the measuring unit of service quality. Most developing countries, including India, struggle to actively incorporate commuter perspectives when assessing the qualitative aspects of service quality. To aid, social media data can prove to be a game shift in this modern digital era to offer an insight into the commuter perception of service delivery. The chapter aims to incorporate social media data for integrating qualitative aspects based on commuters’ perceptions into the public transport SQA framework for the Delhi metro. The study extracts Twitter data, performs semantic and sentiment analysis to comprehend commuters’ concerns and assesses commuters’ sentiments on the predicted concerns. Further, the service performance score is calculated using a weighted SERVPERF scale, and an Importance-Performance analysis is performed to identify the priority areas. The benefit of this method is twofold; first, it allows for establishing a real-time feedback structure that benefits both the service provider and commuters, and second, it allows for the periodic assessment of commuters’ perceptions of service delivery.