By: Kim West, Director of Product Marketing, Uniphore
The growth of social media and review sites has led to consumers increasingly sharing their perception of brands and criticism of products and services via various online channels. Therefore, organizations must know what social media users are saying about their brand to understand how people think and feel about it.
This is where sentiment analysis can help.
What Exactly Is Sentiment Analysis?
Sentiment analysis combines natural language processing (NLP) with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. It’s part of the speech analytics or text mining concept and extracts meaning from text like social media posts, product reviews, surveys and news articles, then assigns a positive or negative sentiment score.
The combination of these techniques enables sentiment analysis tools to provide a better understanding of language and people’s genuine opinions. This allows you to determine whether customers’ attitudes towards a product, service or topic are negative, neutral or positive. As a result, sentiment analysis is often used to understand:
- Sentiment polarity, which assesses whether people view your brand positively or negatively
- Sentiment magnitude, which monitors the strength of their feelings
Sentiment analysis is crucial to saving time and adding value to processes like social media listening, survey response analysis, employee feedback processing and competitor research. In practice, this is useful for enhancing activities like market research, marketing analysis, product design, public relations, financial trading and reputation management.
Using Sentiment Analysis to Improve CX
With sentiment analysis, you can analyze information to understand the attitude, emotions and tone of written content across digital assistants, emails, social media posts and text conversations. You can then use this insight to truly understand what people said and how they said it, improve their perception of your brand and products and humanize the customer experience.
The benefits of deploying sentiment analysis include:
1. Sentiment Categorization
Sentiment analysis enables you to work with more accurate data. For example, NLP uses lemmatization, which collates different forms of a word to analyze various plurals and tenses and identify elements of speech like adjectives, nouns and verbs.
As a result, you can build a more robust analysis of user comments and customer feedback. You can then begin categorizing their sentiment, which allows you to understand how customers feel about your employees, digital and physical stores, policies, products, services and websites.
2. Potential Problem Identification
Unhappy customers increasingly turn to social media to voice their displeasure with a brand’s products and services. You can avoid a potential crisis by using sentiment analysis to track your brand perception in real time. Additionally, emotion analysis, which detects the human emotion behind written text, helps you understand a customers’ emotional state and accelerate potential disputes to the right agent.
3. Competitor Analysis
In addition to helping you better leverage conversational analytics, sentiment analysis allows you to track your competitors and explore how they are perceived in comparison to you. It enables you to use the share of voice (SOV) concept that explores the frequency with which other brands are being discussed compared to yours on specific social channels.
Analysis of customer interactions empowers you to explore which topics are being discussed concerning your competitors’ brands. You can then assess how your products and services fit into the market and potentially identify a niche or untapped opportunity.
Alternatively, you can use sentiment analysis to track the demographics discussing topics on social media. As a result, you can understand which people your competitors are targeting and how effective they are at reaching them, which is crucial to shaping your market approach.
4. Deeper Understanding of Customer Feedback
Sentiment analysis lets you understand exactly how people feel about your policies, products and services. For example, it allows you to pinpoint any issues in your returns policy, the steps you need to take to fix it and track the improvement via customer satisfaction.
You can also use sentiment analysis to identify customers who require additional care, such as an individual having a payment issue, who is frustrated by your call center service or who intends to cancel their account. You can track their feedback to understand the actions required to remedy their concerns and deliver a positive customer experience.
5. Enhanced Call Routing
Sentiment analysis plays a vital role in the decisions your conversational Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system makes. This helps you route callers to the most appropriate agent, resolve issues more quickly and even enable users to solve problems themselves. Sentiment analysis also allows you to carry out mood-based training, which helps staff learn how to deal with challenging situations and difficult or unhappy callers.
6. Legislative Compliance
Relying on spoken words or written text isn’t always satisfactory for compliance purposes. Sentiment analysis provides a deeper understanding of intent and meaning, enabling you to identify the truthfulness of an interaction. This helps you maintain your organization’s reputation and ensure all engagements comply with legislative requirements.
Deliver Great Customer Experiences With Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis gives you the ability to discover how people feel about your brand and use that insight to enhance your customer experience offering. It empowers you to identify people who can become brand ambassadors for your products and services, which can be crucial to your go-to-market, customer outreach, product development and social media strategies.
To deliver all this, you need a service automation platform that helps you:
- Truly understand your customers’ needs
- Improve your customer service offering
- Establish stronger brand loyalty
For more information on how Uniphore can help your organization transform customer experiences with sentiment analysis, schedule a call with one of our experts today.
