Social Media Sentiment Analysis – To identify the true pulse of your customer

 

When customers engage with your company ‒ whether it’s to complain on Twitter or leave a flattering review about your newest feature ‒ there’s always an underlying emotion. With sentiment analysis, you can capture this subjective information to understand your customers better. Why are they feeling negative about your customer service? Which product features do they like the most?

Having access to the right data at the right time can be a game-changer when it comes to making decisions that boost customer satisfaction and loyalty. For example, tracking customer sentiment on social media in real-time can help you instantly spot a critical issue affecting your customers, so you can take immediate action.

What Exactly Is Customer Sentiment Analysis?

Customer sentiment analysis is the automated process of discovering emotions in online communications to find out how customers feel about your product, brand, or service. It helps businesses gain insights and respond effectively to their customers.

But, how does sentiment analysis work? Using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and a series of algorithms, sentiment analysis models are able to detect patterns in text and automatically classify opinions as positive, negative, or neutral.

In short, sentiment analysis automates the jobs you hate, like reading and tagging data so that you can route customer tickets to the correct teams and deal with them as swiftly as possible.

 

Benefits of Customer Sentiment Analysis.

Knowing how customers feel about your company is key to excellent customer experiences. Some of the things you can do with customer sentiment analysis include:

Enhance Customer Service

Top-level customer service is crucial to your business. After all, 80% of customers would switch to a competitor after two or more bad experiences. But how can you know for sure if you are on the right track?

With the rise of social media, forums, and opinions, that one bad experience has the ability to cost your business over and over again.

By being able to track sentiment across the web, you will be able to give your customer service (CX) team a heads up on what might be coming their way. In fact, if an aspect of your product has been widely criticized, your customer support team can even use the opinions to put together an emergency plan to tackle them.

Mining opinions can also help your CX team understand how your customers feel at different stages of the buying journey. This can help them to be more personable with your customers, drive sales, and boost your bottom line.

By running sentiment analysis on survey responses, in which customers rate your customer service, you can learn what makes customers happy and what frustrates them. For example, you might discover that negative comments often relate to long response times – prompting you to start automating responses!

Improve Products and Services

 

Performing sentiment analysis on reviews, social media posts, surveys, and more, can shed light on:

• Issues/bugs that need to be fixed: you might notice a sudden influx in negative comments mentioning bugs
• Room for improvement: customers might often mention specific features in a negative light
• Customer needs: you might receive comments about missing features or poor response times

For example, after analyzing sentiment in product reviews and discovering that most negative reviews refer to “UX”.

Optimize Marketing Strategies

 

Companies can get powerful insights to boost their marketing strategy. For example, marketers can keep an eye on industry trends by analyzing sentiment towards new features or products on social media.

Perhaps your competitor has released a new product ahead of you, and you want to identify any weaknesses so that you can address these issues before releasing your product. You might also identify your competitors’ strengths and aim to emulate them in marketing campaigns.

Another use of customer sentiment analysis is to segment customers. By targeting customers based on how they feel towards your brand, you can create hyper-personalized experiences. Maybe you want to target Detractors in Net Promoter Score (NPS) responses by offering them discounts or free trials. This way you can reduce churn.

Monitor Brand Reputation

 

Customers love being heard.

Every time a customer mentions your brand name, you should be listening. Because each time they mention you, it gives your company the chance to get a glimpse of their sentiment towards your brand and your products.

You can do this by watching what customers say about you after you launch a new product or even a certain marketing campaign.

What are your customers complaining about right now? With sentiment analysis, you can monitor brand mentions in real-time, and send negative comments to the top of the queue at the same time analyze customer interactions in real-time, you can detect negative comments and respond quickly to minimize the problem.

The way customers feel about your brand can change over time, and customer sentiment analysis is a great way of tracking significant shifts. So, whether you’ve just released a marketing campaign, changed your pricing structure, or launched a new product, tracking sentiment can help you keep an eye on customer’s reactions.

 

Article by – Sabin Gomez
Development Manager | Contact Center Digital Solutions | Customer Experience Strategy.