Do you aspire to master all the factors influencing your customers’ brand experience? Do you visualize your enterprise as a change-maker transforming how people engage and communicate with brands?
If your response is affirmative, it implies that you are passionate about your customers. Your fundamental business objectives are to provide successful outcomes to customers’ issues and ensure their phenomenal experience with your brand.
But how do you create magic and make every customer experience memorable? There are various ways to achieve this, one of which is sentiment analysis. A previous article containing an overview of customer sentiment analysis can be read here.
In this article, we look at sentiment analysis and opinion mining in depth. From learning how to analyze sentiments to applying sentiment analysis by businesses, this blog will help you get the most out of your opinion-mining strategy.
Transforming customer experience through emotions
“Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.”
- Steve Jobs.
This is timeless advice from the co-founder of the world’s most valuable company: Apple. The tech giant has an enviable brand reputation worldwide for manufacturing consumer-intuitive products, offering dependable service, and creating delightful experiences for buyers and sellers alike.
The brand has a valuable lesson for companies aspiring to make a mark with their CX strategy. To summarize, we can safely say that
“A business that offers an Apple-like experience every day keeps bad CX away.”
Now, the question that arises for most brands is how to create functional frameworks that are guaranteed to deliver superlative experiences for consumers.
Luckily, we have the answer.
Valuing emotions can transform customer experiences
In the example mentioned above, the company has come a long way by listening to the voice of consumers, fulfilling their wants, and offering experiences that make them want to rave. Hidden in plain sight, the tech manufacturer has a plethora of customer-centric activities going on — which makes for rich, fulfilling customer experiences.
Organizations reputed for service delivery and support know the value of customer sentiments and provide human-centered CX in a predominantly tech-powered world. By doing so, they are transforming their customer experience (CX) blueprint.
Customer sentiment analysis or opinion mining is a sought-after method employed by businesses for guaranteed results. Analyzing sentiments can help extract valuable insights that can be used to offer world-class products, services, and support experiences to customers and help brands establish themselves in competitive markets.
Let’s look at the basics before diving deep to understand how sentiment analysis works.
What is sentiment analysis?
Sentiment analysis is the computational study of people’s opinions, sentiments, emotions, and attitudes. Opinion mining is another iteration of sentiment analysis. Opinion mining helps break down complexities in understanding content, sentiments, and even personal assessments and opinions a person might have of others in the digital space.
Sentiment analysis involves data mining, machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), and computational linguistics to mine data for sentiment and subjective information, such as whether the content has a positive, negative, or neutral tone feeling.
Businesses should analyze customer sentiments to bring up to par the following functions successfully:
(1) Conversion rates
(2) Sales figures
(3) Lasting client relationships
(4) Customer acquisition plans
(5) Overhaul branding efforts
(6) Develop targeted advertising strategies
(7) Communications, and much more
Performing sentiment analysis optimizes the customer journey
Most entrepreneurs know the adage, “Customer success is directly proportional to the quality of service companies provide their clients.” That’s why most brands strive relentlessly to provide consumers with a consistent and positive experience across all channels. To do so, they use data from the sentiment analysis of customers.
Customer success (CS) professionals use sentiment analysis to create CX blueprints to stay one step ahead of their clients and follow their position on the journey map. CS teams factor in diverse scenarios (including problems and their solutions) that will likely manifest during the customer’s journey, along with an analysis of their mindset/reaction to each scenario. This information is embedded within the journey map so clients can attain their goals without getting stranded.
Whether the customer’s journey is focused on servicing a car, purchasing a new mobile phone, borrowing a book, or even redecorating their home, brands use sentiment analysis to discover what matters to customers. It helps them to provide precise, personalized solutions to clients that make them feel special.
Also read: Customer Journey Mapping is The Way to Your Customer’s Heart
Insights from sentiment analysis benefit your business. Here’s how
Conducting sentiment analysis on your customers can open multiple avenues within your enterprise that help you create excellent client experiences. It is a powerful way to capture the very essence of CX and is the need of the hour, helping brands offer complete customer satisfaction.
Obtain integrated actionable VOC insights
Sentiment analysis is extremely useful for being attuned to the voice of the customer (VOC). It helps brands monitor their social media and digital channels. Now, you can use customer behavior data and analytics to discern patterns and trends and optimize customer communication for superior service and unparalleled CX.
Improve overall communication
Sentiment analysis improves the quality of customer support. You can identify priority requests/tickets of business partners and help improve your company’s response time to customer requests.
Aids market research
Measuring customer sentiment on digital and social channels is imperative for branding exercises. Insights from sentiment analysis help organizations create/customize their offerings and make them appealing to their target audience. Create data-backed targeted marketing campaigns to wow customers and improve sales without getting unfazed.
Useful for brand and product management
Insights from customer sentiment data are essential for building products that are loved by people, besides providing valuable data for business intelligence. Opinion Mining improves subscription rates and reduces instances of customer churn.
Aids in human resource management
Creating an environment where employees can thrive is paramount for every organization. It becomes easier to boost employee satisfaction through regular analysis of employee sentiments. Human resource teams can identify the reasons for staff dissatisfaction and take steps to mitigate them.
Mitigate crisis and manage reputation
Time is a critical factor influencing the quality of customer service, which further affects brand reputation. Sentiment Analysis is invaluable for companies in extreme crises, emergencies, calamities, etc. Depending upon the situation and the magnitude of the incident, business teams can configure process and personnel management strategies for exigencies and implement them. Insights related to customer sentiments can help companies time their response to ensure maximum impact in minimum time and protect brand reputation.
Identify bad actors
Helpful for identifying bullies online and discourages cyber harassment. Sentiment analysis helps organizations identify and block inappropriate content like spam comments, abuses, trolling, and more using an automatic detection capability and lets you focus on genuine user engagement.
Analyzing consumer sentiments can lead to valuable experiences
The gateway to provide valuable experiences to clients is unlocked when brands begin to value customer sentiments. If customers receive value enhancement during a service interaction, their likelihood of repurchasing, increased spending, and speaking positively about the brand dramatically increases.
Gartner's research on the state of customer service and support tells us that there are three key ways to drive value enhancement during service interactions.
- Validate customer purchase decisions: Reassure the customer that their purchase decision was brilliant.
- Educate customers on better uses: Rather than focusing on how customers have used the product incorrectly, teach them how best to use it.
- Advise customers on new uses: Introduce the customer to newly introduced or under-utilized product features.
It is important to note that commercial activities such as cross-selling, upselling, and give-backs do not impact value enhancement.
Getting started with sentiment analysis
Big or small, whatever your enterprise’s size — there is no limit to the variety of content/data that can be analyzed to obtain vital insights. Manually sorting or sieving through big data for analysis can be counter-productive. Minute details that are likely to be missed or overlooked by humans do not go unnoticed by sentiment-analyzing software.
Build your sentiment analysis application with a HEART
The HEART model is an acronym that stands for Hear, Empathize, Apologize, Resolve, and Thank. It is a simple but powerful framework that guides service delivery companies and customer care departments through handling customer issues or complaints with empathy and professionalism.
It is a simple but powerful framework that guides service delivery companies and customer care departments through handling customer issues or complaints with empathy and professionalism.
The HEART model helps you to listen actively, show understanding and compassion, express regret and responsibility, offer a solution and follow up, and express gratitude and appreciation.
Also read: Decode What Your Customers Really Want With Sentiment Analysis And Opinion Mining (e-Mag)
How organizations are using sentiment analysis in customer service
Common examples of how organizations are incorporating sentiment analysis into customer service functions:
Using written communication to reply to customer messages
Using sentiment analysis to generate alternative phrase suggestions for customer service agents. Sentiment analysis can be used both before and after working on cases.
Before Working On A Case
Use sentiment analysis to collect and summarize information about previous interactions with a customer and prepare a summary for an agent before the agent gets on the call.
After Working On A Case
Using sentiment analysis to summarize a conversation with a customer, the agent can review and create the summary.
Sentiment analysis aids in reputation management
Besides improving service and support functions, sentiment analysis is immensely useful for brand reputation management.
Reputation is an important determinant of entrepreneurial success. Consistent online reputation management campaigns are ongoing strategies and tactics used to monitor, maintain, and improve a company or individual’s reputation online.
Sentiment Analysis helps brands understand customer behavior, identify the emotions felt by them, and comprehend the reasons that triggered the emotions. Besides monitoring brand mentions online and on social media, conducting sentiment analysis helps you maintain an impeccable reputation for your business.
Conclusion
You can go deeper than demographics, learn how to engage consumers more effectively, and create personalized, high-quality customer experiences to build and nurture more personal, sustainable customer relationships and increase ROI – driven by sentiment analysis.
AI-powered intelligent helpdesk software supports unified communication across multiple channels and transforms customer experience management. It has the potential to help firms collaborate meaningfully and integrate customer data, improve real-time CX, and gain a competitive advantage, ensuring the overall benefits are extended to customers, employees, and the business.
ThinkOwl helps you visualize a future where exceptional customer experiences are attainable and sustainable. Sign up today for a 30-day free trial now.