The Impact of the Content of Online Customer Reviews on Customer Satisfaction: Evidence from Yelp Reviews

As customers are increasingly participating in online product and service reviews, companies can leverage the content of those consumer reviews to improve or retain customer satisfaction. By using a panel data set collected from Yelp, this study empirically tests the effects of voting and sentiment of customer reviews on future customer satisfaction. The results show that cool votes on customer reviews have a positive impact on customer satisfaction in the next month. While average positive sentiment score has a positive effect on customer satisfaction of a restaurant, average negative score has a negative influence. In addition, the diversity of the sentiment scores moderates the effects of positive and negative sentiment scores on customer satisfaction. This research provides a nuanced understanding of how the content of online customer reviews affects customer satisfaction, an important indicator of the quality of service or product.

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