Explainable Sentiment Analysis Application for Social Media Crisis Management in Retail

Sentiment Analysis techniques enable the automatic extraction of sentiment in social media data, including popular platforms as Twitter. For retailers and marketing analysts, such methods can support the understanding of customers' attitudes towards brands, especially to handle crises that cause behavioural changes in customers, including the COVID-19 pandemic. However, with the increasing adoption of black-box machine learning-based techniques, transparency becomes a need for those stakeholders to understand why a given sentiment is predicted, which is rarely explored for retailers facing social media crises. This study develops an Explainable Sentiment Analysis (XSA) application for Twitter data, and proposes research propositions focused on evaluating such application in a hypothetical crisis management scenario. Particularly, we evaluate, through discussions and a simulated user experiment, the XSA support for understanding customer's needs, as well as if marketing analysts would trust such an application for their decision-making processes. Results illustrate the XSA application can be effective in providing the most important words addressing customers sentiment out of individual tweets, as well as the potential to foster analysts' confidence in such support. Copyright © 2020 by SCITEPRESS-Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved.

Omnichannel retailing: Digital transformation of a medium-sized retailer

Most retailers are currently undergoing a major transformation in the process of becoming omnichannel retailers. This case addresses the challenges of an Irish company in the transition from an offline focused retailer to an omnichannel company. Building on its strong expertise in traditional offline retail, the company is aiming to establish itself as an omnichannel retailer that allows for increasing its customer base in Ireland and overseas. The case describes actual challenges along the journey, including the strategic, operational, and technological challenges. It provides an opportunity for students to discuss and understand the practical aspects of the retail transformation process and the linkage between technology and business strategy. The case enables discussions on the multiple aspects in the process of transformation toward omnichannel retail and promotes the development of innovative solutions for transferring customer experience provided in offline retail to online platforms. © Association for Information Technology Trust 2021.