Abstract:

Quality management is an important organizational function for supporting competitiveness and innovation in products and processes of companies, and, for this reason, is also a core topic in the education of management and engineering students. Over the years the education of quality management professionals has relied on heavily on the development of competencies for data analysis and statistics to explore and synthesize data from customer feedback.

In recent years a new area of opportunity for sourcing data for quality management has emerged: the (astounding volume of) online reviews that are voluntarily produced every day by users of products and services. Such user-generated content, also popularly known as electronic word-of-mouth, is acknowledged as a rich and trustworthy source of insights for consumer and managerial decision-making. Despite of the importance of this source of data its wide use for informing quality management decisions is still in its infancy and is limited by the lack of adequate training of graduates in handling this type of data, which is reflected in the slow pace in the updating of curricula of management and engineering programs.

This paper offers a contribution to the development of new teaching and learning experiences and curriculum innovation to build competencies for the analysis of qualitative data from online user reviews, that abound in every business domain. The paper describes the development and implementation of an experiential learning approach to engage industrial engineering and management students in learning how to extract and analyze customer online reviews in order to develop quantitative and visual quality management information pieces. The study describes the projects developed by students that involved the definition of extraction criteria for online data, for selected businesses, the data preparation activities, and the analysis of data to build visual representations of results using prevalent quality management tools, which are usually part of the curricular of management and engineering. The work offers a timely illustration of how to adapt existing quality management tools and knowledge to address new types of data, such as online reviews, offering guidelines to stimulate the experimentation and replication of this teaching and learning approach, while also discussing the key challenges identified in the development of competencies that deal with online customer data in a systematic and rigorous manner.

The call for further knowledge and training of professionals in the use of such customer data in quality management decisions is rising and is expected to increase in the forthcoming years as the digitalization of consumer processes is reinforced as well as the digital literacy of users, that will continue to fuel the impressive volume and richness of customer-generated content, in reviews, posts and fresh insights about their experiences of consumption.

Keywords:

Management and engineering education, data analysis competencies, digital transformation, teaching and learning innovation.