Paper Shrabastee Banerjee accepted for publication in the Review of Marketing Science
The paper “AI Applications to Customer Feedback Research: A Review” by Shrabastee Banerjee (co-authored by Lee Peter at Yale School of Management and Ishita Chakraborty at UW-Madison) has been accepted for publication in the special issue of the Review of Marketing Research on: “Artificial Intelligence and Marketing,” guest-edited by K. Sudhir and Olivier Toubia.
Abstract:
In this paper, we aim to provide a comprehensive overview of customer feedback literature, highlighting the burgeoning role of AI. Customer feedback has long been a valuable source of customer insights for businesses and market researchers. While previously survey focused, customer feedback in the digital age has evolved to be rich, interactive, multi-modal and virtually real-time. Such explosion in feedback content has also been accompanied by a rapid development of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies that enable firms to understand and take advantage of these high-velocity data sources. Yet, some of the challenges with traditional surveys remain, such as self-selection concerns of who chooses to participate and what attributes they give feedback on. In addition, these new feedback channels face other unique challenges like review manipulation and herding effects due to their public and democratic nature. Thus, while the AI toolkit has revolutionized the area of customer feedback, extracting meaningful insights requires complementing it with the appropriate social science toolkit. We begin by touching upon conventional customer feedback research and chart its evolution through the years as the nature of available data and analysis tools develop. We conclude by providing recommendations for future questions that remain to be explored in this field.
Keywords: customer feedback, online reviews, AI in Marketing