Two decades of research on customer satisfaction: future research agenda and questions

Abstract

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.