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What Is Sentiment Analysis?

Sentiment analysis is a technique for evaluating the opinion of an individual or group as expressed in communication, usually with contact center agents. Sentiment analysis solutions monitor conversations and evaluate the content and characteristics of written or spoken language to quantify a person’s attitudes, opinions, and emotions about a specific topic. Businesses may conduct sentiment analysis to understand how customers feel about their products, services, brand, marketing campaigns, and other topics.

How does sentiment analysis work?

Sentiment analysis uses an algorithm that produces a sentiment score by tracking the words a person uses and the inflections and tempo of their speech, which correlates to the person’s underlying feelings about the topic of discussion. Sentiment analysis measures factors such as the rate of speech, the amount of stress or frustration in the voice, and changes in the level of stress. Sentiment analysis may be conducted by humans, with fully automated technology, or with some combination of the two. Some solutions provide tools for automated sentiment analysis with human oversight that enables machine learning technologies to refine algorithms and processes with human input.

What is a sentiment analysis score?

Sentiment is typically scored on a continuum from positive to neutral to negative.

What are the different types of sentiment analysis?

Sentiment analysis is typically accomplished through rules-based or AI-enhanced technology. A rules-based approach looks for words and phrases in conversation that have been determined to signal specific sentiments. This approach is easy to set up but difficult to scale. AI-enhanced approaches use machine learning models to assess sentiment in speech or text. This technology can scale easily within a specific business area or industry, but it is more complex to configure and can’t easily monitor new areas of business without retraining the technology.

What is the benefit of sentiment analysis?

Sentiment analysis can deliver a quantified view into customer opinion on a wide range of topics. This intelligence enables businesses to make data-driven decisions about everything from product features and service offerings to marketing messages and contact center effectiveness.

With a superior sentiment analysis solution, businesses can:

  • Gain deeper insight into product performance.
  • Understand how customers feel about a brand.
  • Gauge the effectiveness of marketing messages and campaigns.
  • Improve customer service by understanding what works well for customers and what doesn’t.
  • Track the effectiveness of every touchpoint on the customer’s journey.
  • Monitor the performance of contact center agents and customer support representatives.
  • Identify common pain points across customer segments and pinpoint areas for improvement.

What is sentiment analysis vs. emotion analysis?

While sentiment analysis measures positive vs. negative opinions about a topic, emotion analysis measures far more complex attitudes – from happiness and satisfaction to fear and shame to anger and disappointment. Understanding both a customer’s sentiment and their emotion about a particular experience can help businesses to more successfully create positive interactions throughout the entire customer journey.

What is sentiment analysis used for in marketing?

Sentiment analysis has been used by political campaigns and administrations to refine messaging after monitoring opinions about campaign advertisements, policies, policy changes, and campaign developments. Sentiment analysis plays a big role in brand management, tracking shifting trends and consumer attitudes toward a brand and its products and services.

What’s important in a sentiment analysis solution?

Sentiment analytics solutions can help to simplify the complex task of gauging customer sentiment. Automated solutions are essential to measuring sentiment at scale, and solutions that support multiple languages help capture 100% of customer conversations. Superior sentiment analysis solutions should offer support across every channel and enable data to be filtered based on demographic traits, enabling more targeted analytics.

What is sentiment analysis used for in contact centers?

In customer service contact centers, sentiment analysis can be a valuable tool for gauging the opinions and emotions of various customer segments. Contact centers may use sentiment analysis to determine the sentiment of groups of customers calling about a specific issue, product, or service, or the sentiment of callers as they relate to a single contact center agent.

What is speech analytics vs. sentiment analysis?

Speech analytics is a technology that can capture, transcribe, and analyze spoken conversations. By determining the meaning, intent, and emotion in a speaker’s language, speech analytics helps businesses gain greater insight into the mindset of a customer or audience segment. Sentiment analysis plays an important role in speech analytics, helping to determine a customer’s opinions or attitudes.

What is sentiment analysis with CallMiner?

The CallMiner Eureka conversation intelligence platform enables businesses to analyze omnichannel customer interactions at scale, interpreting sentiment and identifying patterns that reveal deeper insights from every conversation. CallMiner makes it possible to analyze 100% of customer conversations in calls, email, chat, SMS, surveys, social media, and more. To understand sentiment, CallMiner analyzes the content of a speaker’s words and conversation as well as vocal characteristics like physical stress in the voice, agitation, silence, tempo, vocal inflection, and changes in stress levels.