What do consumers do before purchasing a product or service, especially something expensive?
They tend to scroll down to the reviews section to learn a ton about a product or service and evaluate whether it’s a good fit for what they need.
Consumer’s desire to engage with businesses and the overall brand perception depends heavily on public opinion. According to qualtrics, 93% of consumers say that online reviews influence their buying decisions. Consumers may not buy a product/service if they’ve read a few bad reviews. They won’t research whether feedback was fake or not. In this context, brands that constantly monitor their reputation can timely address issues and improve operations based on feedback. Sentiment analysis allows for effectively measuring customer’s attitudes towards a brand in the information age.
What is sentiment analysis ?
Sentiment analysis, also known as opinion mining or emotion AI, is the process of using natural language processing, text analysis, and machine learning to analyze customer sentiment. In simple words, it is the process of analyzing online mentions to determine the emotional tone they carry, whether they’re positive, negative, or neutral. Sentiment analysis measures the attitude of the customer towards the aspects of a service or product.
It is often used by brands to detect sentiment in social data, gauge brand reputation, and understand customers. Brands can understand the sentiment of their customers — what people are saying, how they’re saying it, and what they mean. Customer sentiment can be mined from tweets/ social comments, comments, reviews, photos or other places where people mention the brand.
Why sentiment analysis is necessary ?
Since customers are expressing their thoughts and feelings online more than ever before, sentiment analysis is becoming an essential tool to monitor and understand it at scale quickly. Sentiment analysis provides answers to the most important issues so that decisions can be made, based on a significant amount of data rather than plain intuition that isn’t always right.
If your business has thousands of feedback per month, it is impossible for humans to read and analyze all of these responses. By using sentiment analysis tools and automating this process, you can easily drill down into different customer segments of your business and get a better understanding of sentiment in these segments.
To sum up, sentiment analysis helps with:
- Identifying negative mentions about a business, a service, a product,
a marketing campaign, events on social platforms, etc. - Analyzing how your customers react to product changes
- Improving customer experiences, products and services
- Examining brand reputation
- Determining future marketing strategies
- Generating leads
- Understanding and resolving pain points in a customer journey
- Highlighting superior performance attributes
Use cases
There are numerous use cases of sentiment analysis and can be applied to any industry, from finance and retail to hospitality and technology. Below, we’ve listed some of the most popular ways that sentiment analysis is being used in business:
Product analysis
When a company puts out a new product or service, it’s their responsibility to closely monitor how customers react to it. Companies can extract reviews/feedback from e-commerce websites like Amazon & Flipkart, brand websites, social media platforms, surveys.
Using Bewgle, it’s easy to keep track of mentions for a specific product and respond to negative reviews before they get out of hand. Filtering comments by topic and sentiment, you can also find out which features are necessary and which must be eliminated. Companies should also observe what comparisons customers make between the new product or service and its competitors to measure feature-by-feature what makes it better than its peers. This data can become part of the product’s evolutionary lifecycle.
Monitor social media
Sentiment analysis is extremely useful in social media monitoring as it allows you to gain an overview of the wider public opinion behind certain topics. On social media platforms customers [especially, Gen Z & Millennials] express a lot of their griefs, suggestions and opinions via comments, liking/disliking of posts etc. Consumer sentiment on social media is one of the most relevant criteria to measure your online marketing efforts. The ability to extract insights from social data using tools like hootsuite, is a practice that is being widely adopted by organisations across the world.
Listen to Voice Of the Customer and enhance the customer service
Brands need to focus on collecting feedback from all sources – analyzing that data and finally acting upon it, are all important aspects of Voice of Customer and should be measured regularly. The real-time analysis allows you to see shifts in VoC right away and understand the nuances of the customer experience over time. Customer Sentiment Analysis algorithms like Bewgle, are capable of capturing and studying the voice of the customer with much bigger accuracy.
Bolstering customer service empathy by detecting the emotional tone of the customer can be the basis for an entire procedural overhaul of how customer service does its job. Brands can use sentiment analysis and text classification to automatically organize incoming queries by topic and make sure the most urgent are handled right away. Since it’s better to put out a spark before it turns into a flame. Its purpose is twofold – it is used to solve an issue and also to give additional insight into the peculiarity of the product use. As a result, the company can continuously map out the strong and weak points of the product and related services and improve its quality seamlessly.
Market research & Competitive analysis
Sentiment analysis offers a vast set of data, making it an excellent addition to any type of market research.
Bewgle solves the problems by processing large volumes of unstructured data. Using this type of text analysis, marketers can track and study consumer behavior patterns in real time to predict future trends and help management make informed decisions. Whether you’re exploring a new market, anticipating future trends, or seeking an edge on the competition, sentiment analysis can make all the difference and provide you with tremendous amounts of information: what consumers like, dislike, or what their expectations are.
Competitive analysis that involves sentiment analysis helps you to understand your weaknesses and strengths and maybe find ways to stand out. A brand should shape its strong online presence to add a competitive edge to both its products and reputation. Bewgle is a powerful tool for anticipating where your competitors are standing, it can also provide you with the specific product or category historical analysis of your competitors. From that, you can grasp the key areas of improvement, understand where your competitors are lacking to make it to your advantage etc. Both positive and negative mentions tell a story about what customers like and dislike about a specific product or brand, so it’s important to tune into the conversation.
To sum up
Sentiment analysis is one of the most valuable technologies in today’s emotion-driven market. Feelings are a huge driving force in the consumer market, so make sure you don’t stay ignorant of the sentiments and emotions which are influencing the decisions of your prospects and customers.
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