Customer expectations are changing everyday; they want instant communication, resolutions, and personalized support across their favorite channels i.e WhatsApp, SMS, In App, etc. Similar to how people express emotions towards friends, family, and colleagues, customers also have emotions towards your brand, products or services. These emotions could range from happiness to anger, disappointment, rage, excitement and more.
In a world where products and services are becoming increasingly commoditized, your customer experience is the main differentiator between you and your competitors. Customers are willing to spend 140% more after having a positive customer experience (Deloitte), so understanding their emotions and keeping track of them can provide valuable insights into strategies that can help boost satisfaction and loyalty. How do you actually collect data on customer emotions, and why is it essential for your business?
Explaining Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis, also known as opinion mining or emotional artificial intelligence, is an important tool that helps companies improve their products and services. Sentiment analysis uses natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to determine whether a given text contains negative, positive, or neutral emotions The text analyzed can be anything from emails to blog posts to social media posts and online forum comments or essentially any data expressed in words.
Why should Businesses care?
Increasing sales and retaining customers are core business goals. According to research by Apex Global Learning, every additional star in an online review leads to a 5-9% revenue bump. There’s also an 18% difference in revenue between businesses rated as three-star and five-star ratings. This means that happy customers will ultimately lead to an increase in retention, revenue and growth; so, understanding how customers feel about your brand or product at scale can provide insights into their perception of your brand, and help you identify areas where you need to improve.
Sentiment analysis can help you understand the emotions of your customers and how they interact with your brand daily. This could include interaction across different customer touchpoints, from your website to insights and meaningful information from unstructured text data such as social media posts, public surveys, online customer reviews and other textual sources. The sentiment data from these sources can impact key business decisions. However, this is not a manual task because there is too much data.
Specialized SaaS tools like Terragon Marketing Cloud (TMC) makes it easier for businesses to extract insights and meaningful information from this sentiment data.
Why should you care about Sentiment Analysis?