Strengthen CX by Introducing Sentiment Analysis to These 3 Channels
Sentiment analysis and text analytics give you added insight into understanding how your customers really feel about your business and their experience. If you are receiving large volumes of customer feedback across various channels, it isn’t realistic to read and analyse every customer comment. You need sentiment analysis tools so that you can gain insights from every comment at a macro level. It makes it easy and straightforward to digest a large amount of data from multiple sources without much workforce or effort.
While quantitative information from metrics such as NPS, CES, and CSAT is beneficial for understanding how your business is performing, sentiment analysis allows you to go deeper to have a more robust view of the customer experience. Examining customer feedback in terms of verbatim comments – whether in a survey, on social media, on review sites, or from speech to text transcriptions – can be a time consuming and thankless task, and often the negative feedback takes priority. This is where sentiment analysis can come in to make a massive difference in how you interpret, understand and score customer feedback. This post explores three major channels to leverage sentiment analysis and how it can significantly improve your CX strategy.
1. Omnichannel Surveys
Surveys are an essential tool for understanding customer experience within any business. Often, they include open comment fields where customers can give additional feedback and opinions on their experience, whether it be about the contact centre, an in-person experience, or online. While the feedback is always useful, it can be overwhelming and challenging to digest. Sentiment and text analysis tools enable you to identify trends amongst your customers’ feedback to see what is working well and what needs improvement.
Sentiment analysis tools will help you categorise feedback and comments based on sentiment (positive, negative or neutral) and sort by particular terms relevant to your business. Any sophisticated tool should allow you to filter by “employees,” for example, to get a pulse on how your customers feel about your staff or for specific products, services, departments, policies, locations, or initiatives. This includes feedback received from contact centre IVR surveys, which is why speech-to-text is also an essential tool that goes hand in hand with sentiment analysis.
2. Online Reviews
85% of customers say that they trust an online review as much as a review from a friend; the power of a positive online review should not be underestimated. New and existing customers alike are going to review sites to read feedback from other customers before they make a purchase. Review sites like Trustpilot, TripAdvisor, Yelp and G2 have become an essential touchpoint of the customer journey, even though they are generally outside of a business’ control.
When it comes to sentiment analysis, online reviews are a perfect data source, as the feedback is honest and unprompted. It is a good idea to use sentiment analysis to keep track of review feedback in addition to your survey data. There is a lot of valuable information that you can use to identify issues that may not have come up in your surveys. It also gives you insights into what potential customers are reading about your brand so you can get ahead of the issues they were warned about.
3. Social Media
Social media mining has become a notable practice for most prominent businesses, but many brands are still intimidated by the prospect of tracking social comments. You can easily scrape social media for mentions of your brand to get a pulse on honest, unsolicited customer opinions, similar to what you might be getting from review sites, but in bite-sized social pieces for anyone to see.
What’s great about analyzing sentiment on social media is that you will get a much more comprehensive range of content, and if you are rolling out new marketing materials, advertisements or products, chances are that someone on social media is sharing an opinion on it. Sentiment analysis for social media will really help you to understand your brand’s image and reputation in ways that experience surveys and reviews cannot. You also can identify how influencers might be speaking about your brand, which is significant given their reach.
