article · International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management
An analysis of two decades of academic literature on customer satisfaction examines how key themes have developed between 2000 and 2023. Using structural topic modelling across a dataset of 1,316 journal articles, the investigation identified ten distinct conceptual topics, charting their prevalence and shifting popularity over time. In addition, an evaluation of cited references demonstrates that customer satisfaction research is highly interdisciplinary, drawing substantially from fields including general business, marketing, psychology, information systems, and statistics. Emerging themes, such as transformative service, highlight an increasing focus on customer well-being. By mapping historical trajectories and uncovering cross-disciplinary influences, this review synthesises past work and presents questions to guide future investigation across hospitality and tourism research.
Understanding long-term trends in customer satisfaction research helps organisations recognise changing consumer expectations. By showing how consumer behaviour concepts have evolved across multiple disciplines, the work highlights newer priorities, such as the role of well-being in service delivery, offering guidance on how hospitality and tourism services can be better structured to meet consumer needs.
Practitioners in tourism and hospitality can apply the documented trends to inform product and service design, particularly by incorporating emerging ideas around consumer well-being and transformative service. Because the research is a broad literature review rather than a tested technical system or business tool, it represents early-stage conceptual insight that requires translation into specific operational strategies.
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Purpose This paper aims to review two decades of research on customer satisfaction to identify key topics, their prevalence and changes in each topic’s relative popularity over time. It also addresses interdisciplinarity in customer satisfaction studies. Design/methodology/approach The data set comprises 1,316 journal articles published between 2000 and 2023. The authors used structural topic modeling to extract defining themes in customer satisfaction research. The authors also analyzed the references cited in these sources to assess studies’ interdisciplinarity. Findings The analysis revealed 10 conceptually distinct topics with varying degrees of prevalence and evolutionary paths. The authors noted that numerous academic disciplines, such as general business, marketing, psychology, information systems and statistics, have influenced customer satisfaction research. Practical implications This study’s findings provide valuable insights for the tourism and hospitality industries. Practitioners can refer to the results to understand trends in consumer behavior. For example, emerging topics such as transformative service suggest that issues of well-being should be considered when designing tourism and hospitality products. Originality/value Using structural topic modeling, the authors extracted unbiased research topics from a larger data set compared with prior reviews and tracked topics’ evolution. In addition, the authors found evidence of how various fields have shaped customer satisfaction research. This study applies a fresh approach to theory development and examines previously intractable research problems. The results point to questions that merit investigation.
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DOI: 10.1108/ijchm-03-2024-0436
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