Customer expectations have never been higher - or more important. 84% of consumers report customer experience being as important as the product itself. Even more importantly, nearly 1/3 of customers will abandon a company after just one negative experience.
Losing business is bad enough all on its own. It's even worse when you realize that 74% of consumers will switch to a competitor following a negative customer experience. Failing to address your customers' needs is giving business to your competitors.
You have to first know what your customers want to fulfill their desires. That's where sentiment analysis tools come into play.
We're going to show you how you can use sentiment analysis tools and perform sentiment analysis using product review data to assess and anticipate your customers' needs. This way you can deliver exceptional customer service and world-class products.
Before we delve into sentiment analysis tools, let's take a moment and define our terminology. What is customer sentiment analysis, exactly?
Customer sentiment analysis is a relatively modern phenomenon. A concise definition of customer sentiment analysis is a way of processing textual information, which is sourced from social networks, to assess customer's feelings."
It takes the raw, unstructured data from customer feedback and translates it into a machine-readable format. This also makes user feedback more useful for things like predictive analytics and examining historical trends.
Customer sentiment analysis isn't confined to product reviews, either. Sentiment analysis tools can factor in what customers are saying about your brand in customer support tickets, social media, surveys, or other forms of written feedback. Together, you're given a rich, detailed picture of your customer's feelings.
Customer sentiment analysis is on the cutting edge of technology. It's veering into science fiction as it relies on artificial intelligence and machine learning to function. This also means the technicalities are somewhat complex for non-programmers.
Text analysis is the engine that drives sentiment analysis. This is trickier than it sounds, as so much feedback is full of slang, mis-spellings, bad grammar, and other things that confuse computers.
Luckily, sentiment analysis has been around for a little while. There are now text analysis solutions that work right out of the box. You simply have to tell the analysis engine what to assess and it does the rest.
We'll go a bit further, though, so you have a better understanding of what's happening under the hood. Text analysis generally breaks down the text using advanced grammatical rules. Think of the sentence diagrams you did in grade school for an illustration.
This segmentation lets the text analysis engine break a sentence down into components. These components are then analyzed through a database of annotated text.
Text analysis can be performed on non-textual elements, also. Some sentiment analysis tools consider emojis, as well.
Now that you know what customer sentiment analysis is, let's consider some ways it can benefit your business. It can improve every customer-facing aspect of your business when done right.
Satisfied customers are far more open to suggestions. Sentiment analysis can help you identify happy customers from the voice of customers. These customers are more likely to accept upselling opportunities, for example.
It also helps you avoid negative experiences. Offering an upselling prompt following a bad customer experience is in incredibly poor taste.
Customer sentiment analysis can help you improve your team, too. Individual transactions can be linked to particular employees, for example. This can help you chart historical trends and identify areas where a team member might need some improvement.
It can also help you keep track of what's being done right. Sentiment analysis can keep track of employees with an exceptional track record. This offers an opportunity to incentivize or reward exceptional performance.
It also creates a chance for exceptional team members to help their fellow employees improve and excel.
Human employees aren't the only ones who benefit from sentiment analysis. It can help you to refine your chatbots in a variety of ways, as well.
Customer sentiment analysis can help your chatbots respond with the appropriate tone. Disgruntled customers can be soothed. Excited customers can be rewarded and then enticed towards a call to action.
Customer sentiment analysis lets you identify changes in customer behavior. These insights help you to know what's impacting your customers. These insights can help you to refine your process in a variety of ways.
Sentiment analysis might reveal an uptick in customer frustration if a particular item is out of stock, for example. These insights can help you get ahead of the curve so you can offer better customer service.
Sometimes we find ourselves in a queue of customers waiting to be helped. While a first-come-first-served policy is nice in theory, sometimes we need to tackle more serious problems first.
Customer sentiment analysis can be used to identify frustrated customers. This can be implemented into a system where they're expedited to the head of the line. Satisfied customers are more likely to be patient and remain in good humor.
It's easy to take our human team members for granted. There are so many little decisions that fly under the radar in every interpersonal interaction. You don't realize how complex it all is until you try and write it into code.
Creating a true artificial intelligence that can make decisions on its own is beyond complex. You need data to help train the network.
Customer sentiment analysis helps train your customer service management software to offer a better experience. Over time, the network learns to identify impatience, dissatisfaction, excitement, or anticipation.
Each of these emotions could trigger a different chain of responses. Excitement or anticipation might produce a prompt for social sharing, for example. Impatience could yield a discount code, transforming a bad customer experience into a positive one.
One of the truly magical things about sentiment analysis is its ability to yield analytics as they're happening. It brings to mind the saying "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of the cure."
Identifying a customer who's having a problem can help you to prevent that problem in the first place. This way, you don't have to entice customers back, remove negative reviews, or do other damage control.
This is especially important as troubled customers are far more likely to leave negative reviews and warn their friends, family, and colleagues.
It's bad enough to lose a loyal customer. Do you want to lose all of their connections, as well?
Loyal customers are your business's most valuable asset. A satisfied, enthusiastic customer can unlock doors that not even the priciest marketing campaign could dream of. Customer sentiment analysis can keep track of all of that positive feedback to identify your super fans.
There are all sorts of things you can do with these insights. You might create a special rewards program with special incentives, for example. You might include a social sharing widget on your eCommerce shopping cart, for example, asking them to share your business to their social networks.
Customer sentiment analysis offers the opportunity to keep track of various signals indicating your most loyal customers. Even better still, you can keep track of these sentiments over time. This way you can keep a detailed history of each customer's satisfaction.
This way you can make sure your most loyal customers never have a bad customer experience!
There can be a bit of a disconnect between the business world and the world of customer service. Outstanding customer service often relies on "soft skills" like intuition, empathy, or going the extra mile. Unfortunately, the C-suite doesn't always respond to hints, subtlety, or intuition.
Imagine you want to allocate funds for improved chatbots. A shareholder's first question will likely be "Why? You already have a chatbot?" This conversation often quickly devolves into bickering and penny-pinching.
Now imagine this same conversation but backed by figures. Armed with these data, you can inform investors that more sophisticated chatbots consistently increase sales by 15%.
When you put it like that, they'll practically beg you to take their money!
The world becomes more and more virtual with each passing year. Futuristic tools like machine learning and artificial intelligence are here to stay. It's time you find out how futuristic tools like customer sentiment analysis can help launch your business into the stratosphere!
Are you ready to find out how sentiment analysis tools can take your business to the next level? Sentiment analysis takes the guesswork out of delivering outstanding customer service. Product reviews are a goldmine for understanding what your customers need and want.
Ready to find out what your brand can do with Sentiment Analysis from Product Review Data?
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