A netnographic study with social media comments for investigating service failures

Abstract

This study demonstrates a netnographic study to investigate airline service failure types and to test differences of linguistic patterns among complaint types on social media user comments. User comments in an airline's Facebook community were scraped and service failure types were systematically classified with the measurement developed by thematic coding and literature review. The results presented frequently occurring service failure categories in airline service operations. A T-Test was conducted to confirm the significant differences in linguistic characteristics between complaint comments and non-complaint comments. Word frequency analysis showed distinctive word themes between the two comment groups. Research and managerial implications were provided.