How Sentiment Analysis could improve your Customer Experience

What are your customers really saying about you?

For decades organisations have used feedback forms, focus groups and first hand comments to gain insight into their customers opinions. The growth of social media and thus a ubiquitous self-publishing platform has led to an explosion of customer opinions being published on the web. Whether its through dedicated response channels or on a random comment thread, people are freely offering up their opinion of your organisation and their customer experience.

How can you harness this data? Sentiment Analysis is an area that has risen to prominence in the past few years, with a number of agencies offering products or services to help you analyse exactly what people are feeling. This software will help you analyse whether a comment about your product or service is positive or negative – though they can struggle when it comes to neutral topics or those involving colloquialisms or slang. Sentiment Analysis provides you with insight into what resonates with your customers, how your organisation is being spoken about in the public sphere, and most importantly how these can help you can improve your customer experience.

There is a huge range of sentiment analysis services available to you, from the free Twitter analyser Twendz to the industry leading Radian6. Let us know your experience with any of these pieces of software or how you feel sentiment analysis could impact your Customer Experience.

Thanks to Nancy Davis Kho for the original provocation Customer Experience and sentiment analysis.

By Colin Shaw | Published: March 29, 2010