Sentiment analysis tools allow organizations to get useful insights about their current and future customers’ feelings towards a product or service. More specifically, whether that feedback is negative or positive, what topics of interests are discussed, customer experiences with staff, complaints or issues, and so much more. These types of insights present businesses with a goldmine of new opportunities to improve their customer engagement strategies.
In a customer-led economy, it is imperative for businesses of all sizes and industries to keep a very close pulse on customer communications, listen to feedback and understand what customers want from their products and services.
There are several key industries that have adopted sentiment analysis tools and have realised great success.
sentiment analysis tools help to develop better customer relationships and increase their bottom line in various industries:
Travel & Hospitality
For the hospitality industry, it’s all about online reputation management also known as e-reputation. E-tourism, is booming as customers flock to the web to book their travel and hotel accommodations. Sentiment analysis tools have enabled hospitality brands to quickly analyse and understand large amounts of customer views expressed across different channels like email, discussion forums, travel review websites, website feedback forms and surveys.
Here’s an example of how we used Keatext to analyse customer sentiment from a leading online travel website:
Another example, Las Vegas Hotels, which typically get more reviews than any other hotel chain, have been diligently leveraging sentiment analysis tools to stay one step ahead of the competition. Many of these large hospitality brands carefully monitor and analyse customer opinions and conversations (average Vegas hotel receives over 600 reviews a month) for information about guest satisfaction, competitor pricing, services and activities offered by other hotels on the strip.
Healthcare
It’s a very exciting time in the healthcare industry. The space is experiencing a major shift in current practices and big data is top of mind for many organizations. The advancement in technology have given healthcare professionals the ability to deepen their understanding of the patient experience.
For instance, sentiment analysis can be used to analyse patient responses from satisfaction surveys. Patient comments can then be segmented and classified by topic, meaning and frequency, and identified as positive, negative or neutral.
One very important aspect of the patient experience is the satisfaction of the treatment they received while in the care of nurses and doctors. Positive responses might include statements like “was kind to me” and “made me feel comfortable”. Negative comments might include things like “was not very helpful” or “didn’t answer all my questions”.
Finance & Banking
The financial industry is one that is still plagued by high customer churn rates. This is simply because, today, customers have a plethora of options – they choose when they want to bank, and which financial services they wish to do business with. As a result, competition is fierce, and companies rely heavily on sentiment analysis tools to track customer sentiment in real-time.
To illustrate the power of the voice of the customer – and the importance of listening to it – let’s go back a few years and talk about that time one of the top financial institutions in the U.S decided (without surveying their customer base) that they would start charging customers a debit card fee. Not surprisingly, customers were furious and immediately took the web to express how they felt. Needless to say, the company quickly retracted their decision.
There are so many other real-life examples of how sentiment analysis tools helped companies salvage their brand reputation and bounce back from bad business decisions. These examples illustrate the importance of tuning into the customer conversation and more importantly- how quickly customer comments can impact the success and viability of a business.
