Customers are always happy to share their opinion, and tracking trends in those opinions can be the difference between business success and failure. You can use sentiment analysis to understand better what your customers want. So, if you want your customers to transform into raving fans, keep reading.
What is sentiment analysis?
Sentiment analysis is a tool used by businesses to detect the emotion behind a customer’s opinion. This type of analysis can find out more about polarity (positive, negative, or neutral) or feeling (sad, happy, angry, etc.).
Sentiment analysis can be a way to quantify qualitative data. Where quantifying something means applying a numerical value to something that usually doesn’t have a value. Qualitative data often comes as open-ended questions.
For example, one could use a rating out of five stars. Five, in this case, is a “very positive” experience, whereas one is a “very negative” experience. Alongside these ratings, you can sort your data further by emotion, making sentiment analysis a way to understand and sort responses.
How does it work with voice?
With voice recognition technology in its current form, you can collect more data from voice than text. By using emotional speech recognition systems, automated systems can gather a customer’s response and emotional state through listening.
Machine learning programs can automatically sort this data using the pitch, format, and words. In this way, voice-recognized sentiment analysis can be incredibly powerful. AI text analysis tools can guess the emotional tone. Companies like Grammarly use AI software to improve and guess the emotional approach of your text.
Despite AI software coming a long way, pitch and vocal patterns are a dead giveaway of someone’s emotions. For example, if you’ve tried to be sarcastic over text, you know misinterpretations are relatively common.
How does sentiment analysis benefit market research?
Sentiment analysis is primarily valuable for supplementing a buyer persona. The persona is an “example customer” that matches the people who generally buy from you. Information about them might include their age, gender, and income bracket.
Grouping these personas into different sentiment profiles gives you a good idea of your audience’s opinion. By grouping these opinions by different emotional levels, you can more easily identify trends for your products.
For example, if you’ve identified customers who are incredibly excited about one feature of your product, you might leverage that knowledge in your marketing. Applying this knowledge to your marketing can help boost your sales, as you speak directly to your customer’s emotions.
Even in online marketing, ads with an emotional response get 23% more sales. You will engage customers more if you work with those emotions and use sentiment analysis for deep customer understanding.
Sentiment analysis for brands: real-world use cases
Sentiment analysis to gain customer feedback is great on paper. But to see it in action, we need to reference a few case studies.
First, in a case study by Repustate, a South African bank struggled to understand why they were receiving negative customer feedback. To address this issue, they used a sentiment analysis system to understand why. Through this analysis, they understood that most of these complaints came through during lunchtime. Namely, because all of their tellers were taking lunch simultaneously, there were long lineups at the bank.
In another study on sentiment analysis on voice data, machine learning of audio results was 70% accurate. The technology is here, paving the way for more compelling data for companies. With this, voice data can automatically sort into different emotional levels, gender, and other vocal factors. Understanding the voice of the customer can help marketers develop better ads, improve customer service, and improve upon the designs of products.
Sentiment Analysis and Your Brand
Sentiment analysis is an incredibly powerful tool that you can use to get in-depth information about your customer. These insights can help you improve your product, meet customer needs, and transform buyers into raving fans.
Through the power of modern voice applications, sentiment analysis can become even more helpful. Through emotional response gathering, you can get deep and accurate insights that text-based AI programs struggle with. Pitch and vocal structure give you more information on a customer’s emotional state, leading to greater responses. To find out how you can leverage this market research tool for yourself, contact our sales team at True Reply.