How Sentiment Analysis Improves Customer Conversations
Every time you interact with your customers, there’s a story to be told. Whether it’s a phone call, support email, live chat or social media message, you can learn how your customers feel about your products, services and overall experience. However, if your business has hundreds of conversations going on daily, it can be difficult to pick up on and understand these emotions. This is where sentiment analysis comes into play.
Sentiment analysis leverages AI and NLP to look at customer conversations and understand the emotions or opinions being expressed. This helps organisations understand if your customers are happy, frustrated, disappointed or neutral. Most importantly it helps identify trends in customer behaviour so you can understand areas which need improving.
What Is Sentiment Analysis?
Sentiment analysis helps organisations understand the emotions customers are feeling during their written or verbal conversations. Rather than just looking for keywords, it looks at the context of the conversation and determines the overall opinion of the customer.
For example, a customer could say to you “The support team was helpful, but my issue took too long to resolve.” While they are happy with the help they received, they’re also not happy with how long it took to resolve.
Sentiment analysis can detect this and help you understand the full customer experience.
This can be used for:
- Customer support calls/chats
- Emails/online enquiries
- Social media comments/messages
- Product reviews/customer feedback
- Post purchase surveys/service ratings
This helps give organisations a clearer understanding of how customers feel about your services.
How Can Sentiment Analysis Help Your Business?
Identifying customer frustrations
Not every unhappy customer will leave you a formal complaint. Some will leave you repeated follow ups, negative comments or show they’re not happy with their support.
Using sentiment analysis you can easily identify these conversations by looking at negative words and tone changes. Your support managers can see these conversations and prioritise them.
This means you can quickly address any issues to avoid small issues becoming bigger issues with your customers.
Improving Customer Service
Customer Service teams deal with a variety of queries throughout the day. However, just because you have resolved the customer’s issue, doesn’t mean they had a good experience.
By identifying patterns in the conversations, managers can easily identify common complaints, communication issues and areas where customers often aren’t happy.
This can help improve support processes, provide extra training for employees and ensure consistency.
Understanding customer expectations
Often customer conversations can tell you what they expect from your business.
If you receive multiple comments about slow response times, confusing instructions or a lack of product information, this can show you areas where you need to improve the customer experience.
Analysing these conversations will give organisations a better understanding of what their audience values. Businesses can use this to improve services, communication and customer support.
Monitoring brand reputation
Your brand reputation can be affected by how customers feel about your business online. If they leave you positive reviews this can build trust, however if there are multiple negative comments this can affect purchase decisions.
Sentiment analysis can help you understand what your customers are feeling about your business on social media, reviews sites and other conversations. This can pick up on any changes in public opinion and help teams identify any issues.
This makes it easier for businesses to address any concerns.
Making smarter business decisions
Customer conversations can provide useful information about your products, services and performance.
If there are multiple complaints about a certain feature of a product, this can show you that you need to update it. If customers are leaving positive comments about your support, this can show you what you should keep doing.
Putting this information together with Customer Service reports and business performance can provide useful insights.
Potential Challenges
While sentiment analysis can provide many benefits, it can be difficult to understand human emotions. Sarcasm, localised phrases, slang and mixed opinions can cause inaccuracies.
For example, if a customer says “Wonderful, another delayed delivery” they are being frustrated.
To overcome this, you should try to use a combination of sentiment analysis and human insight. If you have sensitive complaints or complex conversations, this is even more important. You should also ensure you are using correct data privacy practices when gathering customer information.
Understanding Customer Conversations
Customer conversations can help organisations identify what they expect, identify areas to improve and understand where they can improve customer relationships. Using sentiment analysis makes it easier to understand and organise this information so organisations can move from reactive support to managing their customer experience with more knowledge. Incinque Business Solutions can help organisations improve their Customer Service by providing structured outsourcing and tech driven support solutions. Our focus is on providing efficient processes and customer focused communication to help businesses provide consistent service and improve customer relationships.
