Customer reviews on platforms like the Google Play Store and Apple App Store are a goldmine for companies to evaluate and improve their services. Companies specifically use text mining techniques to convert large volumes of unstructured reviews into structured insights. These techniques extract service-related aspects such as app performance, device compatibility, and payment, highlighting factors that customers are satisfied with or not. However, aspects alone do not differentiate top-priority issues from less urgent ones. Customer actions, meaning what users specifically experience or do, should also be considered. For example, in a review like 'The app keeps crashing,' the aspect 'performance issue' is vague. But when coupled with the action 'crash,' it indicates a specific issue, and its urgency increases if 'crash' is frequently mentioned in customer reviews.
Against this backdrop, a research team from South Korea, led by Associate Professor Do-Hyeon Ryu from Incheon National University, developed a model that integrates service aspects and customer actions using text mining and machine learning techniques, and successfully validated it. Dr. Ryu highlights, "Diagnosing the problem and implementing actionable, prioritized improvements necessitates both aspect identification and an understanding of the associated customer actions." Their study was made available online on December 23, 2025, and published in Volume 90 of the Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services on March 1, 2026.
Researchers outlined the model's four-stage approach for identifying top-priority issues. First, they collected online reviews from major platforms and cleaned and tagged the data. Second, they extracted aspects and associated actions using advanced natural language processing techniques. Third, each review sentence was assigned a sentiment score using a sentiment analysis tool to capture customers' emotional tone, and these scores were then averaged across sentences associated with each aspect to obtain aspect-level sentiment scores. Supervised learning models and explainable artificial intelligence (AI) techniques were also used to estimate the importance of each aspect in influencing overall customer ratings. Lastly, the aspect-action pairs were ranked based on their relevance and the emotional intensity of the reviews to identify critical improvement areas.
Researchers tested the model on 231,705 online reviews of Roblox, an online platform where users play games programmed by them or other users. They found that the model effectively identified the core technical issues causing user frustration as well as what users loved about Roblox. "Given these results, managers at Roblox can make targeted decisions, such as urgently investing in their foundational technology, while continuing to innovate on their creative and social content that drives user engagement," says Dr. Ryu.
The model is valuable to service managers across metaverse platforms and other sectors such as hospitality and retail. Dr. Ryu emphasizes, "The model supports faster problem detection, better resource allocation, and customer-centered service management." As digital services become more personalized, interactive, and AI-driven, such approaches could reshape how companies listen and respond to customers.
Reference
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretconser.2025.104692
About Incheon National University
Incheon National University (INU) is one of Korea's leading national university corporations and a comprehensive university located in Songdo International City, Incheon. Pursuing its vision of becoming a "national university advancing toward the world," INU is systematically implementing six strategic goals in education, research and industry-academic cooperation, social contribution, internationalization, management and infrastructure, and specialization, with the aim of entering the top 10 universities in Korea and the top 100 universities globally.
INU places great importance on the mutual growth of the region and its talent. Through educational, technological, and cultural innovation, the university has established itself as a leading institution in regional innovation. By fostering field-oriented talent and building an industry-academia-research cooperation ecosystem linked to regional strategic industries such as bio, semiconductors, logistics, mobility, and robotics, INU contributes to the development of both the nation and the local community.
Website: https://www.inu.ac.kr/sites/inuengl/index.do?epTicket=LOG
About Associate Professor Do-Hyeon Ryu
Prof. Do-Hyeon Ryu serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial and Management Engineering at Incheon National University. After earning his PhD in Industrial and Management Engineering from POSTECH, Republic of Korea, in 2022, he focused his research on service engineering, AI-driven data analytics, and text mining to decode customer behavior and enhance service quality. His interdisciplinary work explores the intersections of customer experience, human factors, and AI-enabled systems. Before his academic tenure, he was a Senior Designer at Samsung Electronics' Design Management Center, where he specialized in optimizing the user experience for SmartThings.
