Social media analytics

IMB 765 ENHANCING VISITOR EXPERIENCE AT ISKCON USING TEXT ANALYTICS R VINODHINI, S R VIGNESHWARAN AND U DINESH KUMAR R Vinodhini, S. RVigneshwaran and U Dinesh Kumar, ProfessorofDecision Sciences, prepared thiscase for classdiscussion. This case isnotintended to serve as an endorsement, source of primary data, or to show effective or inefficient handling of decision or business processes. Copyright © 2019 by the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore. No part of the publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (including internet) – without the permission of Indian Institute of Management Bangalore. This document is authorized for use only in Prof. Ujjwal Das’s AMDA_T5_09.09.2021 at Indian Institute of Management – Udaipur from Sep 2021 to Jan 2022. Enhancing Visitor Experience at ISKCON Using Text Analytics It was 6 am on Sunday, 2 September 2018. It was a typical monsoon day in Bangalore with the chilly breeze and light drizzle. The International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) temple, Bangalore was crowded with devotees, visitors, and curious minds. Vignesh a research student at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore was at the Higher Taste restaurant inside ISKCON premises, waiting for his favorite Vedic coffee. While waiting for the coffee, Vignesh started observing the crowd and began to wonder what motivated these people to visit ISKCON on a drizzly Sunday morning. Until that day, Vignesh believed that ISKCON was a worship place of Sri Radha Krishna. However, looking at the mission statement of ISKCON on the walls of the restaurant, Vignesh realized ISKCON was much more than a place of worship. Mission statement of ISKCON: “We are trying to give human society an opportunity for a life of happiness, good health, peace of mind and all good qualities through God consciousness.” While sipping the coffee, Vignesh began to reflect on how a temple could give a life of good health. To understand the philosophy behind ISKCON and how it enabled visitors to lead a happy and healthy life, Vignesh decided to meet Karuna Keshava Das, the youth guide at ISKCON. After greeting each other, Karuna said: “We believe that for someone to be happy and peaceful, the foremost necessity for sustenance – food – should be met. A hungry man is an angry man. ISKCON is trying to bring happiness by satiating the hunger of millions of people across the world. The first charitable initiative of ISKCON was the Unlimited Food for Education program which has now grown to become the world’s largest NGO-run mid-day meal program serving wholesome school lunch to over 1.76 million children in 14,314 schools across India.” Karuna also fondly remembered how Steve Jobs quoted his affiliation with the Hare Krishna Movement during his commencement address at Stanford University in 2005. “I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms. I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with. And I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it.” Vignesh, a passionate data researcher, noticed that feedback forms were distributed to the visitors and was keen to understand how ISKCON was using the data that they collected. Karuna Kesava Das said: “You should meet Janarthanan Balasubramanian, Division Head, Information Technology and Online Communications at ISKCON. His team collects a lot of data and you can probably help us analyze the data and tell us what you find.” The following day Vignesh met Janarthanan Balasubramanian, and discussed about how ISKCON was collecting data and how Vignesh could help to derive insights from the data. Janarthanan told Vignesh that Page 2 of 10 This document is authorized for use only in Prof. Ujjwal Das’s AMDA_T5_09.09.2021 at Indian Institute of Management – Udaipur from Sep 2021 to Jan 2022. Enhancing Visitor Experience at ISKCON Using Text Analytics while they gather data from various sources, they did not find potential use of data that was collected and stored. ISKCON was keen to analyze the feedback/reviews from visitors and devotees. Janarthanan elaborated that while ISKCON, Bangalore had footfall from various regions across India and abroad, the feedback form (Exhibit 1) used by them was not enough to get a proper picture about visitors’ experience at the temple. Very few visitors filled the feedback forms placed at various points inside the temple premises. Moreover, with the increasing use of social media, many people preferred to share their experiences in social media platforms such as Trip Advisor, Facebook, and Google. ISKCON wanted to use the data from social media to understand the areas of improvement. Janarthanan said: “It is essential for us to reach out to people and for people to be in touch with us. To understand what visitors are talking about us on various social media, we have a data team that collects comments/reviews across these platforms manually, every day. Our team also collects the offline reviews from the feedback forms placed in different areas of the temple. We do not have enough manpower to analyze the data and take quick measures to improve devotee’s experience at ISKCON. We are trying to explore how analytics can help us improve our services to the visitors.” ABOUT ISKCON The International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), also known as the Hare Krishna movement, was founded by His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada in New York City in 1966. In 1965, he traveled to the United States with the ambition to start the worldwide Hare Krishna movement. In the next 11 years, he established more than 100 centers, temples, vegetarian restaurants, and farm communities, Vedic schools, the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, and initiated various community projects. Many eminent researchers and historians have extensively studied ISKCON and the books by Srila Prabhupada. Diana Eck, Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies at Harvard University, describes1 the movement as “a tradition that commands a respected place in the religious life of humankind.” In the 1980s, Dr. A. L. Basham, one of the world’s authorities on Indian history and culture, wrote about ISKCON:2 “It arose out of next to nothing, in less than twenty years and has become known all over the West. This, I feel, is a sign of the times and an important fact in the history of the Western world.” Around 1984, devotees from across the world took initiatives to open ISKCON centers in different parts of India. In 1987, ISKCON started its operations in Bangalore from a rented house. Later in 1997, the temple 1 2 Source: http://www.iskcon.org/what-is-iskcon/ Ibid Page 3 of 10 This document is authorized for use only in Prof. Ujjwal Das’s AMDA_T5_09.09.2021 at Indian Institute of Management – Udaipur from Sep 2021 to Jan 2022. Enhancing Visitor Experience at ISKCON Using Text Analytics and cultural complex was inaugurated by the then President of India, Shankar Dayal Sharma. ISKCON, Bangalore has since become one of the largest ISKCON temples in the world. ACTIVITIES OF ISKCON ISKCON, Bangalore is not just a religious institution. It has been a charitable society involved in a lot of social work and has initiated several self-sustained groups that work towards improving the physical, mental, emotional, and intellectual well-being of human life3. Akshaya Patra has been an initiative to provide mid-day meals for schools in rural India where most of the children are underprivileged and undernourished4. The Cultural Education Services (CES) wing of ISKCON worked with children to enhance values and life skills through cultural activities. Krishnashraya, a home-based spiritual rejuvenation program, was conducted at various locations in the city of Bengaluru to inculcate the principle of devotion and volunteering among people. Friends of Lord Krishna (FOLK) was a Youth Empowerment Club aimed at guiding younger generation to a happy life. The program also catalyzed the youth culture by designing rich avenues in art, theatre, science, philosophy, and so on 5. Senior devotees of ISKCON organized pilgrimage trips to various holy places in India. The organization was also involved in protecting cows (goshala), nitya annadana (food distribution for temple visitors and pilgrims) and organizing harinama kirtanas and bhajans (musical programs where the devotees sang the holy names of Lord Krishna). OVERVIEW OF IT AT ISKCON The primary responsibility of the IT department at ISKCON was to design, deploy, maintain, and support the ISKCON information technology infrastructure in an efficient, productive, and secure environment. The IT function at ISKCON could be broadly classified into four sections namely: Governance, Infrastructure, Application, and Online Presence. The Governance team was responsible for ensuring that the IT infrastructure was planned and deployed to achieve the strategies and objectives of the organization. The infrastructure team was responsible for supporting the end user computing infrastructure and to set up and maintain the data center and network infrastructure. The application team was involved in enterprise implementation and in developing, maintaining, and supporting various business applications used by ISKCON. The online presence team created and maintained websites and social media accounts for creating awareness on various activities of ISKCON. PROBLEM AT HAND The online presence team at ISKCON collected the visitor feedback from various social media channels to see how this feedback could help the organization improve its services to the visitors. The primary problem at hand for Janarthanan was to reduce the existing manual effort for his team. In 2018, three resources (staffs) were involved in collecting the reviews from social platforms such as TripAdvisor, Google Plus, 3 Source: ISKCON website: https://www.iskconbangalore.org/our-objectives/ Source: Akshaya Patra Website: https://www.akshayapatra.org/ 5 Source: FOL website: https://www.folknet.in/about-us/ 4 Page 4 of 10 This document is authorized for use only in Prof. Ujjwal Das’s AMDA_T5_09.09.2021 at Indian Institute of Management – Udaipur from Sep 2021 to Jan 2022. Enhancing Visitor Experience at ISKCON Using Text Analytics and Facebook and labeling each review into one of the four classes viz, positive, negative, neutral, and mixed. Two other resources converted the reviews from paper feedback forms/feedback registers placed at different points inside the temple, to an Excel file. The team began its day by manually collecting, labeling and collating the reviews in an Excel file6 (Exhibit 2). At the end of the day, these labeled reviews were stored in the database. At the end of the week, the total count of reviews for the four classes viz, positive, negative, neutral, and mixed was calculated to understand the overall sentiment. This was an extremely time-consuming manual process from data collection, that is, manually copy pasting the comments from social mediums to data labeling and collation. Janarthanan wanted his team to spend time and effort on analyzing the data and working on remedial actions rather than on these mundane daily operations. He wanted to understand the issues/topics that ISKCON should work on, rather than manually classify reviews and get the count of each review type. Janarthanan felt that getting only the split of positive/negative/neutral/mixed classes was not enough to draw inferences. Janardhan said: “Having just the number of positive and negative reviews is not helping us much. We want to comprehend if there is any pattern in the number of positive and negative reviews. For e.g. are the negative comments higher on weekends or weekdays? Have the negative comments increased during a particular month? Are there any spikes or dips in negative sentiment? To summarize, we are looking for a timeline analysis that shows if the number of negative reviews have come down over a period of time. This analysis would help us understand if our remedial actions are actually working.” Janarthanan pointed out another issue they encountered because of the manual process of labeling the reviews. He mentioned that each staff used their own logic to label a given review as positive/negative/neutral/mixed. The labels were thus subjective and there was a lot of overlap between the mixed and neutral classes. As a result, the classification count and sentiment label was not accurate. Another confusion with the mixed class (both positive and negative in one review) was to figure out how positive/negative a given review was and how to handle the mixed class. Along with the aforementioned problems, Janarthanan was curious to understand if there was any way to drill-down on the sentiment classification and infer the tone of the reviewer. Vignesh gave another option that they could drill-down sentiments to emotions instead of inferring the tone, that is, if a sentiment is positive, what is the associated emotion (Joy, Peace, Surprise); and if a sentiment is negative, what is the associated emotion (Anger, Disgust, Frustration)? Janarthanan said that his current team was not equipped with the skills and he was looking for a fully automated solution that would automatically extract the reviews from social media and label them into one of the four classes. The results would then be showcased to the management to discuss the top issues that people expressed about ISKCON and how to act upon the visitors’ concern. Janarthanan concluded saying 6 Excel spreadsheet containing the data is provided as a supplementary material Page 5 of 10 This document is authorized for use only in Prof. Ujjwal Das’s AMDA_T5_09.09.2021 at Indian Institute of Management – Udaipur from Sep 2021 to Jan 2022. Enhancing Visitor Experience at ISKCON Using Text Analytics that he was looking for an all-in-one solution that would give the sentiments, trends, emotions, and top 10 issues to be addressed. At the end of the meeting, Vignesh was rapt and inquired as to why a charitable society like ISKCON gave so much importance to visitor feedback and had a dedicated team to investigate this. Janarthanan elaborated: “ISKCON’s vision is to bring more visitors to the temple and spread the message of Vedic scriptures so as to increase the awareness of Krishna consciousness among masses. We want to understand the good/bad of ISKCON from a visitor’s perspective. What we think good, might be less appealing to visitors. For e.g. ISKCON and “food” are synonymous in people’s mind. Hence, we thought feedback would revolve around the quality of food and meal portions. On the contrary, lately, we are seeing negative reviews popping up in social media for the souvenir stalls we have in the exit pathway of the temple. We would like to reach out to people and make them understand that souvenir stalls are a means to fund our charitable activities, as we cannot rely only on donations all the time. Visitors should understand that buying from our stalls is a form of help to our charitable work. ISKCON is the only temple that provides extremely tasty, rich and hygiene free food for every person who visits the temple. Very few temples provide one free meal a day or sometimes on special occasions. We are looking to continuously improve the experience we provide to our visitors and clarify ourselves on any sort of negative sentiment from people’s minds.” Janarthanan gave Vignesh all reviews they had manually collected from January 2015 to September 2017. The sample data is provided in Exhibit 2 and data dictionary is provided in Exhibit 3. Upon analyzing the data, Vignesh came up with few difficulties that was not elementary.  Comments had at least two different languages apart from English.  English reviews had a lot of spelling errors.  Many reviews were duplicated. Vignesh called up his friend Vinodhini, who had previously dealt with text data and detailed the problem statement. Vinodhini found another set of new problems with the data. One major problem was that the reviews were not only in English, French, and German, but also had Hinglish (Hindi language written in English). Another problem she encountered was regarding the classification labels – how do we handle the mixed and neutral classes? The following explanation was given by ISKCON for mixed and neutral classes: “Mixed type” is when comments are both Positive and Negative. Page 6 of 10 This document is authorized for use only in Prof. Ujjwal Das’s AMDA_T5_09.09.2021 at Indian Institute of Management – Udaipur from Sep 2021 to Jan 2022. Enhancing Visitor Experience at ISKCON Using Text Analytics ‘E.g. Temple is clean and well maintained, but it looks like a mall with way too many shops.’ “Neutral type” is just giving facts. ‘E.g. Temple will be opened till 12.30pm.’ After a few brainstorming sessions, Vignesh and Vinodhini identified the following decision points: 1) How do we reduce the manual effort and automate the current process? 2) How do we create a user interface (UI) that will make the entire data analysis more efficient? What open-source technologies should be used? 3) How do we perform a trend analysis with the given data? 4) How do we handle the multi-label classifications (positive, negative, neutral, mixed)? Is it necessary to have four classes? Can the mixed class be merged with either positive or negative class? 5) What kind of emotions would people have when they visit the temple? How do we analyze these emotions? 6) How do we handle Hinglish and other language comments? 7) What actionable items do we suggest for ISKCON based on text analytics? Page 7 of 10 This document is authorized for use only in Prof. Ujjwal Das’s AMDA_T5_09.09.2021 at Indian Institute of Management – Udaipur from Sep 2021 to Jan 2022. Enhancing Visitor Experience at ISKCON Using Text Analytics Exhibit 1 Feedback Form Source: ISKCON Exhibit 2 Sample Data Reviewer Review date Review ID Source 1 Facebook Hari Shanker 10/8/2017 2 Facebook Dr-Harsha Vardhan Reddy 10/8/2017 3 Facebook Sujit Tiwari 10/8/2017 Review Subject N/A Text Review rating Review Type Excellent devotional place Hara rama Hara krishna Huge temple. Inside it having lot of shops. It is very good place to get peace of mind n pray to God… Hare ram Hare ram ram ram Hare Hare… Hare krishna Hare krishna krishna krishna Hare Hare….. I like this very much 5 POSITIVE 4 POSITIVE 4 POSITIVE Page 8 of 10 This document is authorized for use only in Prof. Ujjwal Das’s AMDA_T5_09.09.2021 at Indian Institute of Management – Udaipur from Sep 2021 to Jan 2022. Enhancing Visitor Experience at ISKCON Using Text Analytics Exhibit 2 (Contd.) 4 Google Jason Zachariah 5 Google Anand G 6 Facebook Anil Grover 7 Trip Advisor LizWaz 8 Trip Advisor Vtvram 9 Trip Advisor Krishna1906 10 Facebook Yassigue Roger Fofanan I loved the architecture. But towards the end, commercialisation of the complex send a bit of bad vibe. Still, i liked the place a lot Nice temple … 10/8/2017 Whenever i visit, I feel very peaceful. Jai mata di …..hare 11/8/2017 kreshna ji…..Jes jagha per parmatma ka VAAS hai..Vo jagha SAWARG se the SUNDAR hai…..AGR Worth a visit, 11/8/2017 Lovely beautiful deities, temple wonderful chanting and incense and prasad was offered, a delicious curried rice. Very clean and excellent gift shops. 11/8/2017 A cultural It is not a temple in the strictest term as complex the atmosphere of an Hindu temple is missing. It is more a picnic spot Visited May 2014 11/8/2017 Pilgrimage Divine and heavenly. Very neat and serene atmosphere. But one thing I do not agree is the forced sale of various products inside the temple. Visited June 2014 Spendid temple. Tres 12/8/2017 beau a visiter et propre. Reflète une image agreable a bangalore. 10/8/2017 4 MIXED 5 POSITIVE 4 POSITIVE 5 POSITIVE 3 NEGATIVE 5 MIXED 4 POSITIVE Source: ISKCON Page 9 of 10 This document is authorized for use only in Prof. Ujjwal Das’s AMDA_T5_09.09.2021 at Indian Institute of Management – Udaipur from Sep 2021 to Jan 2022. Enhancing Visitor Experience at ISKCON Using Text Analytics Exhibit 3 Data Dictionary for Online Reviews Variable Name Review ID Description Source Review By Social medium on which the review was posted Reviewers name Review date Date of review in format Title of the review Review Subject Text Review rating Review Type Content of the review Rating given by the reviewer Labels given by ISKCON team Source: ISKCON Page 10 of 10 This document is authorized for use only in Prof. Ujjwal Das’s AMDA_T5_09.09.2021 at Indian Institute of Management – Udaipur from Sep 2021 to Jan 2022.

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