Towards an inductive model of customer experience in fitness clubs: a structural topic modeling approach

ABSTRACT

Research question

A significant advancement in marketing studies has been the use of big data analytics to explore and derive customer experience (CX) insights. With fitness businesses’ pivoting towards managing CX along the entire customer journey, this study aimed to understand CX in the commercial fitness industry.

Research methods

A textual corpus of three million words was extracted from a total of 24,231 Yelp reviews on 1,045 fitness clubs in the United States. Structural Topic Modeling (STM), content analysis, and topic network analysis were performed to identify CX themes and their inter-relationships. We then inductively identified topics and themes germane to CX in fitness clubs and derived a general CX model.

Results and findings

Sixty-eight relevant topics were identified through an iterative STM and content analysis process and were subsequently interpreted using the CX paradigm and experience design framework (Funk, 2017; Voss et al., 2008). Our final model integrates experience design elements (i.e. stageware, orgware, customerware), customer journey (i.e. pre-usage, usage, post-usage) and CX (i.e. subjective and internal responses) and shows the interrelationships among them.

Implications

Our model offers an integrative and coherent theoretical framework to examine CX in commercial fitness clubs. Our model and methodology allow researchers and organizations not only to capture CX and the relative salience of CX topics, but also to track CX trends over time, compare the experience design elements of an organization, measure CX performance against competitors, and link CX topics to other criterion variables (e.g. retention rate, financial performance, business survivability).

KEYWORDS:

• Customer experience
• computational social science
• topic modeling
• text mining
• online review
• eWOM

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author note

Luke L. Mao, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor with the Department of Health, Exercise and Sports Sciences at the University of New Mexico.