When we read any sort of text, review, or comment online, we can pick up the general vibe of what someone was feeling without having to think about it. One of the problems we face in today's world is complete text overload. We are getting bombarded with so much information all at once that we can’t keep track of all the messages we receive.
Many companies of all sizes have tons of customer text responses piled up at any given time, but we are just human after all, and it's almost impossible to analyze all those text messages manually without any sort of error or bias. That's where sentiment analysis comes into play.
Imagine a situation: you’re a small window cleaning business and you receive around 15 responses to your customer's surveys every month via email. You could review each and every one of them in detail and come up with an analysis on your own with no great difficulty.
Now, imagine hundreds or thousands of text responses a day! It goes without saying that you wouldn’t be able to read them all and still expect to run a business, let alone have a life!
Let’s also look at it from another perspective. We all have bad days where we just aren't feeling ourselves because we woke up on the wrong side of the bed that morning. We might misinterpret some of those messages more negatively than when you’re bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Good thing that the computer doesn’t have bad days and suffers from the temperamental bias humans do or any other kind of bias for that matter.
In short, sentiment analysis over text can make sure the feedback is used to turn into actionable items your company can make use of in a meaningful way.
What is Sentiment Analysis?
Sentiment Analysis is a segment of Natural Language Processing, a field in the nebulous world of Artificial Intelligence, in which AI bridges the divide between computer and human languages. This can be used to understand and analyze a customer's perception of a product or service on massive amounts of text almost instantly.
Sentiment analyzes the opinions, emotions, or aspects of a topic, person, or place and is usually classified as positive, negative, or neutral.
For example:
“This was the best pizza I’ve ever had in my whole life!” → Positive
“The pizza was ok.” → Neutral
“My pizza was burnt to a crisp! Never coming back!” → Negative
If you are interested in simple applications of sentiment and keyword analysis visit Google's Natural Language API Demo and give it a try.
How Can TxtSquad Help You?
Customer Support & FeedBack Analysis
"Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning." - Bill Gates
When it comes to resolving customer issues, being able to sense the urgency of the problem and organizing them is an important tool. Let’s say you are receiving hundreds of messages a day from customers.
This increases the chance of letting a code red emergency from slipping through the cracks! TxtSquad will flag these “code red” text messages and your team is automatically pinged about negative comments so they can move on to any emerging crisis before it gets out of control.
For HR and Customer Relations
Helps you survey open-ended employee/customer feedback to truly understand key issues impacting your workforce/client base. Here’s an example:
Let’s say you send out a company text survey at the end of every month. The question this time is, “How do you feel about reducing employee hours during downturns in the market instead of layoffs?” Tough question, but with TxtSquad you would be able to gather the overall sentiment of your workforce to understand what the best course of action is to take.
Understanding the mood of the employees through workforce surveys and addressing their concerns offers a feeling that their voice is heard and valued.
Sales
Getting whatever edge you can when it comes to your sales funnel is important. No one likes to get cold calls in the middle of the day and no one reads the spam sales emails that inundate our mailboxes. Texting potential or existing customers is the way to go!
Getting that initial feel for the customer right off the bat could be useful to narrowing down potential leads. When you are in the middle of a sales process that is taking time it can help speed things up when you see that a customer is reacting in a positive way. Additionally, it makes you stay on top of what people like and dislike about your product or services.
Stay on top of what people like and dislike about your product or services through text and quickly addressing the issues faced by customers is paramount to any business.
Bottom Line
Understanding what customers are saying and how they are feeling will remain the most important factor for any business, large or small. We are all joining the digital world and AI is definitely the last frontier and TxtSquad is at the forefront of this revolution. The ability to quickly understand consumer attitudes and react quickly is the key to establishing long-lasting customer relationships.