How to Improve Your Customer Sentiment Analysis

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 Is Customer 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

Why Is Customer Sentiment Analysis Key for Your CX?

Customer 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.

Critically, feedback from sentiment analysis can be used to identify customer pain points and improve customer experience (CX). In fact, top CX uses of customer sentiment analysis include:

Proactively Mitigating Social Media Disaster

This is one of the customer sentiment analysis benefits we alluded to earlier. According to the White House Office of Consumer Affairs, unhappy customers will tell between 9 and 15 people about their experience, with 13 percent sharing their customer experience woes with more than 20 people. That’s some serious social media fallout, if left unchecked.

By gaining a better understanding of customer sentiment, businesses can take proactive measures to correct negative experiences and improve overall customer satisfaction.

This minimizes the number and impact of disgruntled customers who broadcast their grievances on social media—leaving your brand reputation intact.

Empowering Product Innovation

Customer sentiment analysis isn’t just about damage control. Customers frequently share their product “wish list” and/or “fix list” with businesses through various channels.

This feedback can help enhance product development and fix bugs in current product offerings or capabilities.

It can even identify new areas for growth and help businesses seize upon emerging trends before their competitors do.

Elevating Customer Service Performance

It should come as no surprise that improving customer service is one of the leading benefits of customer sentiment analysis.

According to a study by CCW Digital, 60 percent of consumers would consider switching to a competitor after two or fewer bad experiences, while 17 percent considered leaving after a single bad interaction. That’s bad news, sure. But there’s a silver lining…

Customer sentiment analysis can detect which pain points are driving customers away—and help customer service teams correct them.

Armed with this information, customer service leaders can provide more impactful coaching and even assist reps during live interactions.

What’s the Role of CX in Improving Customer Sentiment Analysis?

Truly effective customer sentiment analysis requires a CX-wide approach that involves every channel. That includes analyzing content across digital assistants, emails, social media posts and text conversations to fully grasp customer attitudes, emotions and tone.

You can then use these insights to truly understand what people said and how they said it, improve their perception of your brand and products and humanize the customer experience.

6 Ideas to Improve Customer Sentiment Analysis

By now, the benefits of customer sentiment analysis should be clear. Let’s now dive into the ways businesses can create a sentiment analysis strategy that delivers results and drives outcomes. Here are six of the leading use cases for customer sentiment analysis:

1. Sentiment Categorization

Customer 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

As mentioned earlier, 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, customer 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

Customer 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 centre 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

Customer 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: