What is sentiment analysis? Tools, best practices & more

Analytics of all sorts provide invaluable insight to managers and team leaders in charge of call center operations. Among the many metrics worth considering to improve your organization’s efficiency, sentiment analysis stands out as particularly powerful.

Whenever a customer interacts with your brand, their overall experience can play a significant role in deciding whether they will continue to do business with you. However, ensuring each customer’s experience is as positive as possible can prove to be a tricky process. Sentiment analysis allows you to get a concrete answer directly from your customers without negatively impacting their experiences.

What is Sentiment Analysis?

Sentiment analysis is an automated process for mining consumer perception information from large and often disorganized data sets.

Instead of the ubiquitous customer satisfaction survey or other methods that require direct consumer input to be effective, sentiment analysis tools take social mentions, typed words and even spoken phrases into account to determine the overall impression your company gives its customers. Underlying feelings are intuited by carefully constructed lexicons loaded with word/emotion associative information.

Sentiment analysis allows your company to harness the power of much larger data stores than other analytics options and derive genuine insights from them. Both positive and negative associations can be interpreted from global sources of data using sentiment analysis tools. This allows organizations to determine both the successful facets of their operations and their potential failings.

Sentiment Analysis Tools

Context coordination is key to success in implementing any sentiment analysis system. Certain tools and commonly used lexicons cause sentiment analysis results to skew when used on subjects outside of their intended wheelhouse. For instance, tools trained on specific data sets involving topics such as movies, music, and entertainment in general may prove inaccurate when used on more technical user comments and the like.

Sentiment analysis tools may also disagree with each other, giving different results for the same data sets. Choosing a specific tool comes down to determining what your organization’s unique needs are and how you prefer to use detailed metrics in your business’s strategy development process.

Following are a few key features you should look for when making a final decision on sentiment analysis systems for your company:

Automation

Although sentiment analysis tools can be incredibly valuable to developing companies of any size, they need to run without constant configuring to be of practical use. Fully automated tools like speech analytics solutions offer the best bang for your buck by handling the background technical details of relaunching scans and querying specific sources without requiring too much input from your team to stay on target.

Multilingual Capabilities

Tools that can accurately assess more than a single language open the door for substantial insight discovery.

If your company has customers in multiple locations where different languages are spoken, then the importance of a sentiment analysis tool that can drill into each of these with comparable accuracy is hard to overstate. Making use of tools that do support multiple languages yields results that otherwise might have eluded detection with less capable solutions.

Demographics Tracking

Another easy way to miss out on deeper insights when choosing one sentiment analysis tool over another is to overlook the importance of demographics targeting.

Tools that are capable of dynamically filtering out data based on demographic traits can discover important details about individual focus groups that others would likely have missed. For a more narrowly targeted analytics campaign, keep demographics tracking and filtering capabilities in mind.

Multiple Source Support

Most sentiment analysis tools pull their data from more than a single source, mining multiple social media sites and news resources to improve overall accuracy in their final assessments. However, some tools take this approach further than others, effectively capitalizing on reams of data in public forums, blogs, surveys and myriad other sources that competing tools are ill-equipped to accommodate.

Custom Reports

The way the data your chosen sentiment analysis tool captures is corralled and presented to you makes a major difference in how you will perceive it and how much of it you can incorporate into your current strategy.

The best options on the market provide a significant degree of customization in this area, allowing you to choose data representations that support your current goals without requiring much technical knowledge to do so.

How to Leverage Sentiment Analysis

Although every company’s needs are unique, there are a few ways that any organization can derive greater benefit from sentiment analysis tools. Following are a few worth considering:

Track Reputation First

Many aspects of your business’s operations can be subjected to sentiment analysis, but the biggest factor at play tends to be overall reputation. Monitoring your company’s reputation trends keeps you on the cutting edge of consumer perception without narrowing your focus too far to be useful.

Delving into other aspects of your organization that consumers are discussing can prove helpful, of course, but you should maintain constant visibility of overall reputation in real-time to react effectively to developing trends and setbacks.

Pair Sentiment Analysis with KPIs

Metrics make sense of developing trends in your business, but they can only say so much without having contextual information to lean on. Sentiment analysis tools deliver such information in spades, allowing you to match specific performance indicators with sentiment trends for deeper assessments.

For example, matching a positive trend in consumer sentiment with similarly positive call center speech analytics results can help in identifying successful call resolution tactics.

For information on the ways in which sophisticated speech analytics tools can empower your organization, take a look at our white paper, 10 Ways Speech Analytics Empowers the Entire Enterprise.

Utilizing sentiment analysis can help your business identify market opportunities among consumers, improve brand-customer relationships and even avert major publicity crises in real-time. The information above should help you make the most of this novel technology and incorporate it into your stock of tactics for long-term business development.

How has your company made use of sentiment analysis?