Transforming customer experiences through sentiment analysis

3-minute read

Quick summary: Advanced sentiment analysis solutions give businesses the granular insights they need to respond to continuously escalating customer expectations. Find out how from Travis Jones, whose insights on the subject recently appeared in Fast Company.

In Salesforce’s most recent State of the Connected Customer study, 80% of respondents said a company’s customer experience is as important as its products and services. Sixty-five percent said they expect companies to adapt to their changing needs and preferences.

In today’s hyper-competitive business environment, the more quickly an organization can adapt to customers’ wants and needs, the better its chances of gaining an advantage. As customer expectations continue to shift and escalate, businesses are turning to AI-driven technologies—particularly advanced sentiment analysis solutions—for the detailed insights they need to respond.

How sentiment analysis works

“What do customers want?” is a question as old as business itself. We can’t always count on customers telling us directly what they want from us, particularly in customer service, so we turn to sources that can provide reliable clues, including call center transcripts, emails, chatbot conversations, social media exchanges, online reviews, and other interaction channels.

Rule-based sentiment analysis

Rule-based sentiment analysis has been around since the early 2000s. This approach involves searching the text of customer interactions to identify words and phrases that may indicate the person’s frame of mind, from positive (“helpful,” “would recommend,” “works perfectly”) to negative (“disappointed,” “frustrating,” “poor quality”).

While still useful for certain applications, rule-based sentiment analysis misses the context in which these individual words and phrases appear, and its binary nature skips over the broad spectrum of human emotions that lie between “positive” and “negative.”

To read the entire article, visit Fast Company.

Travis Jones is the Chief Operating Officer at Logic20/20.