As a business owner, regardless of the industry you work in, you know collecting customer data can open avenues for your business that would have otherwise been untapped. It doesn’t matter what sort of business you run, how big or small your company is, or what kind of product or services you provide, collecting customer data should translate to better decision making and insights for your business.
Companies are increasingly collecting vast amounts of data about their consumers in hopes of using it to streamline their customer journey, and eventually increasing their ROI. However, data collection is only the first step. Understanding that data is the real key to improving your business. This is where sentiment analysis comes in, allowing you to dissect and comprehend the data while generating meaningful insights efficiently.
Sentiment analysis, the key information from that collected data, is what allows these companies to create meaningful insights from the collected data. This form of analysis focuses on the evaluation of written and spoken text to determine the intended emotion expressed toward a company. Using this data opens avenues into understanding what is or is not working for a company’s brand.
This form of data mining, specifically opinion mining or emotion AI, empowers businesses when automated into their daily processes. The metrics they establish empower businesses to take necessary measures to improve their offerings.
Analyzing sentiment from customers' texts, written or spoken, requires brands to have a solid understanding of how customers think. Collecting and analyzing textual data in the form of surveys, questionnaires, and social media platforms allows brands to understand their customers’ opinions about their products and services.
Benefits of Implementing Customer Sentiment Analysis
Understanding how the public feels about your brand is key to providing exceptional customer experience. Here are a number of ways demonstrating how the implementation of customer sentiment analysis can positively influence your business.
Studies show that it takes less than three bad experiences for customers to forgo all brand loyalty and switch to a competitor. Exceptional customer service is crucial for business growth. Sentiment analysis makes sure you are on the right track by analyzing customer feedback. It provides valuable insights into what, when, and why customers had negative emotions about your brand. This can help your company in avoiding any factors that contribute to their negative experiences. Based on a study we conducted in Lucidya, we found that businesses who used our tool to analyze public sentiment enjoyed a decrease of 67% of negative mentions/comments within 1 year of using the technology.
Customer sentiment analysis helps brands identify various issues or difficulties that customers run into. I’ve seen multiple examples of brands performing sentiment analysis on customer reviews, surveys, and social media platforms that they used to identify what is lacking in their brand, and what actions could help them towards improving their existing and future products and services.
With effective sentiment analysis models you can identify industry trends, gain insights into leading markets, and use these insights when venturing into new markets. In my opinion, it is critical for businesses to be aware of key trends in their industries, which help boost their marketing strategies and leverage gathered insights by creating hyper-personalized and trendy experiences. This can go a long way in helping businesses reduce churn rates and improve customer acquisitions.
I know for a fact that building a business from scratch is never easy, but the tougher part is actually the effort required in maintaining your brand perception in a competitive market. For me, sentiment analysis went a long way in helping actively track customer feedback, and manage brand reputation from the customers' point of view.
Through sentiment analysis, you can easily investigate the customer perception about a brand or topic, and discover why they are not happy with a certain service. By discovering and resolving these services, you can stop negative PR in real-time and minimize any impact on the brand reputation that you’ve built through years of effort and hard work.
I’ve seen how customer sentiment analysis can help brands take action to improve their products and services. I believe that discovering customers' feelings about your business or your products and services can help you understand where you need to improve and make changes. Most importantly, by running sentiment analysis on your competitors you can fine-tune your brand strategy, and gain better results from your marketing strategies.
Practical Example of Using Sentiment Analysis
An airline company receives hundreds, if not thousands, of social media mentions on a daily basis. Some of these mentions are questions, some are accolades, but more importantly are the complaints. In order to maintain high customer satisfaction, they need to respond promptly to these complaints. Swift responses help in mitigating risks that these complaints can cause by going viral, resulting in a PR disaster.
How can these airlines filter out the complaints from thousands of mentions swiftly and effectively? Instead of hiring an army of customer support agents, these airlines can rely on tools like Lucidya that use AI to gauge the sentiment of each post in a fraction of a second, then alert the right team instantly whenever a complaint is detected.
The key takeaway for me in this example is how with minimal effort, and in a very short period of time, sentiment analysis can rectify customer pain points while significantly boosting customer satisfaction and generating high ROI by repeating business with those customers.
Sentiment Analysis to Supplement Your Existing Customer Experience Tools
Along with sentiment analysis, I find chatbots to be one of the most exciting business opportunities in today's data-fueled world. Chatbots are a wonderful example of how sentiment analysis can supplement your customer experience tools. Chatbot software focuses on enhancing customer experience by automating conversations and interacting with consumers through messaging platforms.
Businesses are increasingly improving their customer experience by adding sentiment analysis features to their chatbots. Conversational customer sentiment analysis enables chatbots to understand customer sentiment, be it positive, negative, or neutral, by analyzing sentence structures and verbal cues.
Chatbots are a wonderful example of how sentiment analysis can supplement your customer experience tools. Chatbot software focuses on enhancing customer experience by automating conversations and interacting with consumers through messaging platforms.
Implementing sentiment analysis in chatbots can benefit businesses in a number of ways including, but not limited to, accurate and faster response, empathetic service, and providing relevant conversation to customers.
The adoption of sentiment analysis by businesses in recent years has led to enhanced customer experience and redefined the meaning of understanding your customers in a big way. In my opinion, no matter how big the enterprise, every business can benefit from investing in doing sentiment analysis of their target audience.
In conclusion, to be globally competitive, it is important for businesses to adopt technologies of the future such as artificial intelligence and natural language processing. The Kingdom's Vision 2030 aims to develop several new sectors in the country, with a huge focus on new technologies and products. I believe that the development and adoption of such technologies by local businesses will go a long way in helping propel the Saudi economy into the future.
