Validation of Survey Measures for Behavioral Customer Engagement with Textual Content from Customer Reviews

The availability of numerous customer engagement scales, coupled with frequent modification or integration to suit particular research objectives, has resulted in a relative paucity of studies focusing on their rigorous validation. This study contributes to the understanding of this issue from a novel perspective: nomological validation through analysis of integrated heterogeneous data. This methodology involves analyzing the association between the textual content of customer reviews and scaled response data on customer engagement to examine whether the estimated relationships align with prior theoretical or empirical expectations. For the empirical analysis, these data were collected through a survey of hotel users. The review text was transformed into 1- and 2-gram terms, and their relationships with latent factors indicative of customer engagement were examined. As a result, theoretically and empirically sound terms related to customer engagement were identified, but several terms yielded inconsistent findings. This study thus focused on incongruent findings on satisfaction and dissatisfaction, which are typically considered closely related to behavioral customer engagement, and discusses the challenges of the present survey measures. This holds potential for broader implications and contributes to the validation and use of other customer engagement scales.