Customers’ experiences of fast food delivery services: uncovering the semantic core benefits, actual and augmented product by text mining

Abstract

Purpose

This study conceptualizes food delivery services as service mix decisions (SMDs) and illustrates a data-driven approach for the analysis of customers' written experiences.

Design/methodology/approach

Web scraping, text mining techniques as well as multivariate statistics are combined to uncover the structure of the three tiers of SMD from consumers' point of view.

Findings

The analyses reveal that fast food delivery is not primarily about speed but that there are four distinct experiential factors to be considered for SMDs. Fast food delivery services are associated both with the actual product (i.e. product issues and brand satisfaction) and with the augmented product (payment process and service handling).

Originality/value

Findings demonstrate the relevance of SMDs in omnichannel food retail environments and guide researchers in multistage analyses of consumers' online food reviews.

Citation

Teichert, T., Rezaei, S. and Correa, J.C. (2020), "Customers’ experiences of fast food delivery services: uncovering the semantic core benefits, actual and augmented product by text mining", British Food Journal, Vol. 122 No. 11, pp. 3513-3528. https://doi.org/10.1108/BFJ-12-2019-0909