Sentiment Analysis - Deep dive into how your customers feel

Customer feedback has always been present in the market, but what led the companies to sentiment analysis? Do the companies don't rely upon honest feedback or was something still missing? Well, this is a big question for many! 

As we move ahead in the fast-paced journey of digitalization, businesses are leading toward a strong online presence. In today's business landscape, every company is required to stay proactive on digital touch-points to get accurate insights into their customer's sentiments. Understanding the true emotions of customers is a powerful way to create a competitive benchmark for your brand and stay on top of your market. This is exactly what a Sentiment Analysis helps in. It is a method that assists businesses in analyzing customer feedback to evaluate their emotions, intent and authentic experiences with the products and services. It is also known as Opinion Mining or emotion AI, as this is a technical way to assess the real emotions or connotations of words from the textual data. 

Need for understanding emotions through language

It is well understood that customer sentiments play a big role in marketing and sales, empowering businesses. Let us understand how? Sentiment Analysis covers a broader aspect than just customer feedback, as it is important for companies to keep proper track of their business image and industrial trends.

Nowadays, more than 80% of consumers are available on social media websites, making it easier for businesses to extract feedback. But still, brands face challenges in understanding customer opinions without sentiment analysis. It is necessary to gather valuable insights about how customers perceive your brand or product on a larger scale. With the help of technology and tools, businesses can easily derive deeper information from text data, comprising customer reviews, employee surveys, and social media posts. Analyzing the sentiment data provides profitable inputs to assist in making the right business decisions. 

Benefits of Sentiment Analysis

From necessary insights to competitive benchmarking - Sentiment Analysis provides multiple benefits to businesses.

Negative experiences can lead to 80% of customers leaving the brand. Being aware of customer sentiment allows brands to identify areas for improvement in their offerings as well as communication. Acting on that feedback and becoming a better brand result in a more positive customer experience and increased customer satisfaction while lowering the risk of customer churn. Sentiment Analysis helps brands understand the drivers of customer loyalty. Adequately working on promoters, passives, and detractors by understanding their emotions and offering what they require is essential.

In-depth customer insights & Positive Brand Recognition

When brands measure customer sentiment, they uncover a rich source of customer insights to act on, a strategic roadmap to walk on. These analyses support quantitative metrics ultimately leading to better decision-making for the firms. Monitoring customer sentiment provides valuable information about how customers perceive your brand. You can see how good a reputation you’ve built and can inform your branding and reputation management efforts.

Deliver exceptional support & upsell your brand

By properly segmenting your customer base & working on them separately, you can customize different offerings for different emotional triggers. This enables you to retain more customers & create upselling opportunities by leveraging satisfied customers.

 Source of Customer Sentiments

To holistically understand your consumers, you need to understand every interaction you have with them. From texts to store visits, everything matters. Vaguely relying on tools and their data isn't enough, every business needs to dig deeper and integrate its efforts. In addition to survey forms

Social media monitoring and brand management

With FB, Instagram, Twitter, and more such platforms having 4.14bn active users worldwide & becoming easily accessible & users sharing about everything, these platforms have become a go-to for everyone. Companies can scan social media for mentions and collect positive and negative sentiments about the brand and its offerings. Social media sentiment is often more candid -- and therefore more useful.

Customer service response

Bolstering customer service empathy by detecting the emotional tone of the customer can be the basis for an entire procedural overhaul of how customer service does its job. Nowadays, customer interaction with the brand takes place on multiple platforms, so data can be gathered from there. From chatbots, emails, and texts to various surveys, customer interaction data can be taken & understood accordingly.

Product analysis

When a company puts out a new product or service, it's its responsibility to closely monitor how customers react to it. Companies can deploy surveys to assess customer reactions and monitor questions or complaints that the service desk receives. 

Use of Machine Learning

Machine learning & AI-enabled tools have made it easier for companies to get integrated & deeper insights related to customer data. Through Machine Learning, brands now get more contextual & relatable data which helps understand various shades of customer emotions. From frustration to sarcasm, new-age AI analyses it all. 

Matter of Differentiation with Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment Analysis is a great way for creating a major difference in the business, leading towards a road ahead of the market competitors and improving the overall quality of products and services. A recent survey also reveals that any customer reads at least 10 reviews before making the final purchase. Analyzing these reviews can be helpful. This helps in creating targeted marketing campaigns and also provides identification of gaps in the market. With the data derived from Sentiment Analysis, companies can assess the real pain points of customers and quickly address them, which automatically proves to be better for customer engagement, retention, and brand loyalty. In simple words, with the help of sentiment analysis, it is easy to track where the shoe is pinching the consumers. Therefore, by solving the issues, businesses can foster higher growth in the market.

Conclusion

As we progress into 2023, firms have very well understood the need to empathize with customers to build a sustainable relationship with them. In addition to various quantitative tools & metrics, various qualitative ways are also being used. Growing reliance on qualitative methods for understanding consumer mindset helps product managers or customer success managers more accurately plan their products, services, and pathway. Due to this reason, the market for sentiment analysis is growing at a high rate, leading to increased application of AI and machine learning in analyzing customer feedback. In 2020, the global sentiment analysis market size was valued at $3.13 billion and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 14.6% from 2021 to 2028.

Source- QDegrees, News, Bain & Company, Research gate