How Companies Can Use Sentiment Analysis to Improve Their Businesses

In the last few years, sentiment analysis has become quite popular among different brands. So many organizations are now incorporating it into their business to gain useful insight and automate processes.

What is sentiment analysis?



Also known as Mining Opinion, sentiment analysis is the process of analyzing and understanding an opinion to determine the emotional tone underneath.

It can also be described as the contextual mining of text which identifies and extracts information’s from various platforms and help business understand whether the underlying sentiment behind the product and services they offer is neutral, positive or negative.

In a world where more than three quintillion bytes of data are generated daily, sentiment analysis has become the best tool for gaining critical insight into various data and automating processes.

Through sentiment analysis, these raw data can be transformed into structured data which can be useful for commercial applications like public relations, products reviews, product feedback, and customer services.

Why Mining Opinions is Beneficial





Some of the benefits of sentiment analysis include:

• Optimize marketing Strategy: Although so many organizations use social media to promote their brands; carrying out sentiment analysis enables organizations to optimize their marketing strategy.





Through sentiment analysis, organizations can know if their social media marketing strategy is right and the necessary changes they must put in place to make them stand out.

• Evaluate ROI on marketing campaign: The success of every marketing campaign does not only lead to an increase in likes, comments, and followers on the companies social media pages.



It also leads to an increase in the number of positive discussions about the brand among customers which helps the firm to measure its ROI on marketing campaigns.

• Increase product quality: Knowing customers opinion about your products and services enables organizations to discover key areas that require improvement in order to meet the customers need. Remember that products are services are not judged only by how well they performed but also how they are presented.



You can only get ideas on how to improve your products from your customers through surveys or casual discussions.



• Improve customer service: Sentiment analysis helps organizations manage customers’ complaints and avoid leaving them feeling ignored.



It picks out negative discussion and alerts the customer service team members so that you can respond to them when a customer complains about your products, the earlier you react, the better they get to forget about it, and this helps you have a satisfied customer.

• Lead generation: Adjusting your marketing campaign, having excellent customer support, and improving product quality to meet the customers need can increase sales and help you gain more customers.



Sentiment analysis also helps you discover what your customers need and help you create products that attract new and loyal customers. • Sales Revenue: One of the most significant benefits of sentiment analysis is to boost sales revenue.



When a company has a good customer service and improved product quality which can be achieved through sentiment analysis the sales revenue will automatically scale up.



The fact remains that when there are more positive discussions about your product on social media, your sales revenue will increase and when the discussions are negative reverse will be the case.

• Crisis management: Sentiment analysis also plays a huge role in helping organizations manage the crisis. This is because constant monitoring of social media conversation can help mitigate against damage which could be caused by bad product quality, unacceptable customer service or other environmental harms in an emerging market. Once not managed on time, such negative feedbacks might go viral and cause a huge crisis to the image of the organization.

How AI improves sentiment analysis



Typically, when Artificial Intelligence is mentioned, “emotion” does not come to mind. However, AI can be used to understand a customers’ emotional response to product experience, news, movies, and many more.





The technology behind sentiment analysis involves natural language processing which converts opinion into data sets to uncover essential trends over time.





Usually, analyzing each piece of feedback can be quite overwhelming. However, artificial intelligence helps organizations analyze large volumes of data quickly; and provide in-depth insights which could lead to better customer’s satisfaction.

Artificial intelligence in sentiment analysis also enables organizations to convert findings into better products, services, and experiences.

Why Customers Say Certain Things



The internet has made it easy for customers to air their opinion quickly and that is why negative information’s about brands go viral quickly. However, with sentiment analysis organizations can uncover what customers are saying about their products and why they are saying it.

Sentiment analysis provides tools that help brands discover the reason why customers leave some negative or positive feedback. It mines through customer’s languages to uncover what customers like or dislike about a product, what their emotions are and the exact reason why they leave such feedbacks.

Through information’s provided by sentiment analysis, organizations can gain real insight into why customers are saying these things automatically.

For instance, let’s say you have done a sentiment analysis and uncovered that customers are not satisfied with your products. Here is an example of data that was mined.•



Customer A: I don’t like their products



• Customer B: Their product was terrible; the quality was below my expectation

The first sentence is an example of basic sentiment analysis which shows that the customer is unhappy with the company’s product, but he never stated what you could do to improve the situation. While the second sentence showed a customer, who is frustrated due to the quality of the company’s product.

Example Usages of Sentiment Analysis



Sentiment Analysis is used for different purposes. It can be used to monitor brand reputation across different social media platforms. Other uses cases of sentimental analysis include:



• Brand Monitoring: Every customer wants his or her voice to be heard, and that is what sentiment analysis does. It helps organizations monitor what customers say about their product and services after the launch of a new product or a marketing campaign.



• Track Feedback from Employees: A lot of organizations ignore this all-important but straightforward task which could lead to the growth or fall of the firm. Sentiment analysis helps organizations to analyze employee’s survey and segment them. With sentiment analysis, employee voices can be heard directly, and their satisfaction level can be tracked easily.



• Product analysis: Sentiment analysis also helps organizations to know what products are selling out fast, those customers like and those they don’t. With this, every organization can create a marketing campaign that meets the needs of people in various segments.



• Monitor market research: For new companies or old once launching a new product, marketing research is fundamental. It helps organizations to keep an eye on the target market after product launch and also provides crucial information that can save your firm lots of money.



• Improving customer support: Research has shown that more than 25 percent of customers stop using a product after a single bad customer service experience. However, with sentiment analysis organizations can track sentiment across various social media platforms, blogs and forums which give the customer service team key areas to improve on. They can also use the opinion generated to put together an emergency plan on how to get over such situations.



• Remain Competitive: Sentimental analysis also helps you keep an eye on your competitors and discover new areas to improve your product and service. • Social Media Monitoring: This is another way through which various businesses are using sentiment analysis to discover what customers are saying about their products. By digging into customer’s social media opinion about your brand, you can know the right issues to deal with urgently and those to attend to later.



• Crisis Management: Sentiment analysis also plays a huge role in helping organizations manage the crisis. This is because constant monitoring of social media conversation can help mitigate against damage which could be caused by bad product quality, unacceptable customer service or other environmental harms in an emerging market. Once not managed on time, such negative feedbacks might go viral and cause a huge crisis to the image of the organization.

Sentiment Analysis Software

Sentiment analysis tools make use of natural language processing to analyze online conversation on various social media platforms, forums, and blogs to determine if they are positive, negative or neutral.

Some of these tools include:



• Quick Search: Known as one of the best social media search engines that provides an instant overview of brands online and extensive coverage of social networks including blogs, forums, and news sites; Quick search helps companies carry out a quick brand review, identify emerging trends, content ideation, and competitive intelligence.



• Hootsuite Insights: Hootsuite is one of the best tools for social media monitoring. It has a user-friendly interface that helps blogs to monitor various social media channels and provides insight into trends, trends, stores, sentiments, and influencers. Through Hootsuite, you can also gain insight on people commenting on your brand through various categories like gender, social media tools, location or language. You can also monitor by keywords.



• RapidMiner: Rapid Miner is a data science tool that helps organizations analyze social media post, online reviews, documents, and official publications. They can also identify topics that are trending, collect feedbacks on product launch and get new ideas on how to expand their business and make their product better.



• Wonderflow: Wonderflow is a software platform that mines customer’s information’s from different context, format, languages, and forums. It has a user-friendly platform which enables organizations to analyze data not just form the company website but from other places like Walmart, Amazon and others in order to gain insight into what customers are saying about a product.



• Keyhole: Keyhole s a perfect tool for businesses interested in keeping an eye on their competitors. It helps you track your competitor’s marketing strategy and how they are working against yours. However, the major drawback of Keyhole s that the software s restricted to social media platforms. Therefore it can’t be used to track sentiment form marketplaces and online stores.



• MeaningCloud: MeaningCloud provides multilingual analysis of opinions from various sources and determines if they display positive, negative or neutral sentiments. It also has custom dictionaries for sentiment classification. Ideally, MeaningCloudfeatures global sentiment, the sentiment at attribute level, identification of opinions and facts, detection of irony, graduated polarity and help organizations to identify opposing opinions.



• Sentigem: Sentigem is a fast tool that helps organizations to analyze a large amount of data in seconds. Users are to sign-up with their free business email, activate their account with a link sent to them and register for an API key.• Social Searcher: Social Searcher provides real-time search data from various social media platforms like Twitter and Google +. It also has filtering options that include social channel, sentiment and post type. This amazing sentiment analytics took features unlimited history, comprehensive analytics, language recognition, and email alerts and notifications



Conclusion

Finally, with the amount of data being generated all over the globe presently. Sentiment analysis remains the best tool for gaining critical insight into various data and automating processes. It is of great importance to every organization, and if carried out in the right way, it is capable of opening up the gold mines in the customer’s opinion and help business automate processes while increasing sales.



