Cause-effect relationships among factors impacting customers’ satisfaction with zero-waste products: a text mining and multi-criteria decision-making approach

Zero-waste products are items that are designed to minimize waste generation and environmental impact throughout their lifecycle. These products aim to reduce or eliminate the use of disposable materials, promote reuse and recycling, and encourage sustainable practices. The assessment of these products has been investigated from different perspectives. However, the factors that impact customers’ satisfaction are rarely investigated; specifically, the use of online customers’ reviews to discover satisfaction dimensions is not explored in previous studies. This study aims to find what factors impact customers’ satisfaction with zero-waste products using a new methodology. The method is developed using text mining and multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is used to discover the satisfaction dimensions from the 10,342 online customers’ reviews collected from Amazon.com. Using LDA, nine satisfaction dimensions (product effectiveness, environmental impact, convenience and usability, packaging and presentation, quality and durability, cost-effectiveness, health and safety, product innovation, and sustainable packaging) were discovered from textual reviews. This study then uses the Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) to analyze cause-and-effect relationships among the discovered factors from customers’ perspectives. The results of analyzing cause-and-effect relationships showed that product effectiveness, environmental impact, product innovation, cost-effectiveness, and health and safety have the highest impacts on customer satisfaction. This study found that product innovation and environmental impact are the significant factors influencing the effectiveness of zero-waste products.