Your brand reputation is one of the most critical-- and delicate-- aspects of your company. How your customers view your business and talk about you to others has a real impact on your sales, profits, and bottom line. For this reason, sentiment analysis is quickly becoming a requested tool among businesses and contact centers.
In fact, over 80% of businesses compete on their customer experience alone, which is up 36% from 2010. That is why more brands than ever are concerned with customer experience. In one survey, 88% of companies now prioritize customer experience in their contact centers.
But how do you know if your efforts to improve your customer experience are paying off? And how can you ensure that you’re concentrating on the issues that concern most to your customers in order to provide a positive customer experience?
Sentiment analysis is a powerful analysis tool that helps companies understand what their customers really think about their services and products based on their own experiences.
What is Sentiment Analysis?
Sentiment analysis uses Natural Language Processing (NPL) with certain algorithms to scrutinize communications and identify trends in opinions. It gives companies insights into how the general public, whether customers, prospects, or peers, feel about their brand.
Through AI, sentiment analysis evaluates phone conversations, emails, reviews, direct mentions, comments, and more to see if overall customers are happy and why. These evaluations give leadership insights into patterns in customer dissatisfaction.
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Three Ways Sentiment Analysis Can Help
In a world where customer opinion means everything, sentiment analysis can provide a significant edge over the competition. The technology enables brands to increase customer loyalty and gives deeper insights into what your customers think of you, whether it’s positive or negative.
It can also take human emotion out of the analysis. For example, the loudest customer is most often the one that receives the most attention. However, there may be subtle trends with quieter customers that you may not notice until it is too late.
Monitoring Call Behavior
Why are people calling you? And how do they feel afterward? Sentiment analysis can provide your contact centers with the insights they need to deliver a better customer experience. In addition, it can pick up on trends that you might not otherwise notice, weeding through individual phone calls and complaints.
Instead, sentiment analysis can use these trends to improve your customer service team. For example, most customers will get annoyed being passed from person to person to get their issue resolved. Instead, you can use trends in call behavior to match customers with the right type of agent in order to quicken contact resolution times.
Real-Time Analysis
Speed is crucial when it comes to customer service. The faster you can meet your customer's needs, the happier they are likely to be. In one survey, 40% of customers stated that they wanted companies to focus on speed when handling their needs. The faster you can respond to an upset customer, the more the situation can be contained.
Sentiment analysis happens in real-time to enable you to respond as quickly as possible. For example, it could alert you that customer complaints are rising fast, which may prompt you to get more agents on the phone quickly to help alleviate the call burden and respond to more customers quickly.
Omnichannel & Social Media Analysis
How your contact centers respond to phone calls and handle customer issues is essential to your customer experience. However, voice calls may not be the only way that customers will contact you if they have a problem. In fact, they may find much more public ways that require your immediate attention.
Understanding your brand reputation on social media, review sites, and other public channels is critical to getting a complete picture of how your customers view you. It also gives you a chance to show off your customer service skills to prospects who check your profiles on these sites.
Sentiment analysis enables you to see if customers are complaining on your Facebook page or leaving reviews for you on Yelp. It can give you insights into what they are saying and trends in their comments.
For example, do customers comment that your customer service is friendly and prompt? Are multiple buyers having issues with your product? An analysis can let you know what you are doing, whether right or wrong.
Sentiment analysis is a rapidly growing technology with an increasing number of insights and uses for businesses. To learn more about what it can do for you, reach out to our team today!
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