Customer sentiment analysis is a means of processing data, typically in text format and often from customers, to determine their emotions and opinions.
Customers are always leaving their feedback or opinion on your product or service through one medium or the other – be it social media, forums, etc.. Feedback can be positive, neutral, or negative sentiment. Their experience could reveal several key indicators that point to the problem your service or product is facing.
With hundreds or thousands of responses and opinions being gathered weekly through your help desk or other tools, it may seem daunting to try and understand what customers are saying without reading every single response. This is where sentiment analysis, a computer-based method, can be of best use.
Being able to understand hundreds of customer emotions through sentiment analysis can help identify patterns and trends to help improve your customer user experience.
In this blog post, let’s understand how sentiment analysis can help organizations improve their customer service experience.
How is customer sentiment analysis carried out?
Customer sentiment analysis is a machine learning method that includes breaking down a customer response into constituent words, assigning similar nature words a number to reflect how positive, negative, or neutral-sounding that word is, and then aggregating the scores for each word to receive an overall sentiment score for the response. With the score in hand, organizations can evaluate the sentiment and note appropriate feedback.
Modern sentiment analysis models focus on satisfaction (positive, negative, neutral) but also on outlooks and emotions (angry, happy, frustrated, etc), and even on motives (e.g. interested to buy your product, disinterested to buy your product).
What are the benefits of analyzing customer sentiments?
Getting to know how your consumers feel about your product or service is key to improving the customer experience you offer them.
1. Get Constructive Product or Service Feedback
One of the major benefits of analyzing customer sentiments in responses is to easily identify areas of improvement in your product or service. Negative feedback could surface incredibly slow loading time for your app from your support team or a critical bug that was left unfixed for a long period of time. Early analysis of this kind of customer feedback could help you proactively improve your product and improve the overall satisfaction of customers.
2. Improve Customer Service
By getting periodic customer feedback through CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) or NPS (Net Promoter Score) surveys, you can easily get hidden insights about the quality of customer service that your customers are receiving. You can understand which types of customer issues are taking the longest to achieve resolution. Using these insights and customer sentiment, meaningful changes can be brought upon in your customer service processes.
3. Monitor and Measure Brand Popularity
By using sentiment analysis, you can quickly identify those angry tweets or posts directed at your company in social media and act immediately. These posts if left unnoticed, can severely hurt your brand popularity. A quick response goes a long way in ensuring customers that they are receiving state of the art customer experience. These also would help de-escalate the situation which would have otherwise gone into a point of no return.
By performing extensive analysis, brand popularity can easily be measured and trends over time can be analyzed. Customer analysis is also a must for public relations. It also helps marketers and bloggers analyze to ensure that message to their customers is relevant and informative.
4. Refine Marketing or Product Strategy
Weaknesses and Strength of your brand’s competition can easily surface through proper customer sentiment analysis. By focusing on your competitors’ weakness, you can adjust your marketing and product strategy. Even the strengths of your competitors can be used to your advantage if you can emulate or replicate them in your product or service. The Return on Investment of marketing campaigns can be evaluated both on numerical (conversion rate) and non-numerical (customer sentiment) returns.
There are some demerits of not paying enough heed to negative customer opinions:
Customers vent out their frustrations through online media, in hopes that other customers who are intending to purchase your product or service will avoid the same experience. Negative customer experiences can result in:
- A decline in customer acquisition rates.
- A decrease in profit margins.
- Loss of overall trust and positive hype around your brand or product.
Where to measure customer Sentiments?
Modern organizations interact with customers through a wide variety of channels. Some of the popular channels to measure customer sentiments are:
1. Customer Support
Most organizations use software like HappyFox, Zendesk, or just Email to centralize and manage all their support requests. By exporting customer responses to a sentiment analysis tool, you can quickly identify how happy/neutral/sad a customer is based upon the service you have provided them. HappyFox has inbuilt customer sentiment analysis feature, which means you can get instant customer sentiment ratings, right within your help desk interface.
2. Community Forums
Companies build their own public forums for customer interaction. Having a good forum presence will boost brand reputation and increase customer loyalty. Therefore it is very important to keep an eye on angry customer posts and resolve their issue quickly. These outliers quickly get surfaced by running the customer posts through a sentiment analysis engine.
3. Social Media
Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter continue to be the most popular choice for customers to reach out to your brand. By collecting all the tweets and direct messages that mention your brand, a comprehensive analysis can be performed to evaluate customer sentiment. Most social media platforms allow companies to export the customer response data through their API.
4. Software Review Sites and Marketplaces
Customers usually leave reviews about your product or service in popular review sites like Capterra, G2 Crowd or GetApp. The customer reviews that these providers showcase are pretty comprehensive and a lot of insights can be gathered from them. The best way to get data for sentiment analysis on these websites is through data extraction via web scraping.
Tools to Perform Sentiment Analysis
HappyFox Help Desk provides sentiment analysis features out of the box, so that you don’t have to use external tools to analyze the data. The sentiment of agent and customer is accurately determined right inside the ticket details page:
In general, once you have successfully gathered data that needs to be analyzed, the next step is to run it through a customer sentiment analysis tool to analyze customer sentiment. The following sentiment analysis tools use a mixture of different approaches, but these are all comprehensive solutions to analyze your data:
- IBM Watson Tone Analyzer
- Google Cloud Natural Language Processing (NLP)
- Clarabridge Speech Analytics
- OpenText Sentiment Analysis
- SAS Sentiment Analysis Tool
- Basis Technology Rosette API
- Amazon Comprehend
- Linguamatics I2E
- Expert System’s Cognitive Automation
Alternatively, If you are a developer, you can use open-source libraries like RapidMiner, Python Natural Language Tool Kit (NLTK), GATE, and others, to build powerful sentiment, analysis models.
Track Sentiment using Business Intelligence tools
Once you have successfully analyzed your customer responses for sentiments, you can pull in those data into HappyFox BI to visualize them beautifully in real-time and apply business intelligence techniques to gather insights from data.
Bottom Line
The overall customer experience of your users can be revealed instantly with sentiment analysis, but it can get far more granular too, by means of advanced analysis. The ability to quickly understand consumer attitudes and react quickly is the key to establishing long-lasting customer relationships.
Proper Utlization of Sentiment Analysis leads to greater customer satisfaction.
HappyFox help desk is an advanced customer support software with built-in sentiment analysis feature. If you’re new to HappyFox, we’d love to showcase a full-fledged demo of our product. Let’s find a time to meet!
