82% of Consumers Read Online Reviews Before Choosing a Business: What are People Saying About Your Company Online?

Getting feedback from your customers is always important since it shows you what you are doing well and also spotlights areas where you need to improve. However, customer reviews also play a vital role in customer acquisition. In fact, research shows that 82% of consumers read online reviews before choosing a business and 52% of customers between the ages of 18 and 54 said that they always read customers reviews about a company. The importance of customer reviews is more important now than ever before given the rapid growth of online shopping. It is always important to monitor what customers are saying about your business on various consumer sites, social media and the internet at large. Since it would be very time consuming to have someone manually perform such tasks, researchers developed AI sentiment analysis products that perform this work automatically. 

In this article we will take a closer look at sentiment analysis, how such products are created and what it can do for your business. 

What is Sentiment Analysis? 

Sentiment analysis is analyzing how customers feel about your products, services and your company as a whole. AI scours the internet for any mention of your company and it can understand the tone of the statement. Such systems are trained with large volumes of text-based training data which is annotated by humans to label important words or phrases the machine needs to learn. More advanced annotation, such as named entity recognition (NER) would also have to be done which would require data annotators to classify all of the mentions in the dataset into various categories. Creating sentiment analysis products requires a lot of raw data and subsequent data annotation since language is very often vague and highly contextual. For example, someone could leave a sarcastic review using words like “great” or “top quality” and the system would mistakenly classify it as a positive review. Therefore the more training data you have, the more accurate the system will be. 

Advantages of Sentiment Analysis 

Sentiment analysis tools can be useful for making sense of the information you already have and finding and analyzing new information. For example, you may already have lot;s of customer reviews on your website or from feedback forms that you customers filled out. It would take a lot of time for a single person or even a team of employees to read all of the reviews and classify them accordingly. It would be even harder for them to extract meaningful insights to facilitate your decision making. Now, imagine how much information about your business is spread out in the far corners of the internet. Simply collecting all of this information, let alone reading and classifying it, is seemingly impossible. 

This is where a sentiment recognition system can really help you to understand how your customer perceives you as a company as well as your products and services can unlock hidden business opportunities. For example, sentiment analysis can help you identify your happiest customers which can lead to upselling opportunities while avoiding trying to upsell to disgruntled customers. You can also use sentiment analysis to identify key emotional triggers. You may find out that using particular words or emojis has a positive or negative impact on the customer’s overall mood which could impact their buying decision. 

Importance of Sentiment Analysis in Ecommerce 

Positive customer reviews are very important in ecommerce and can really bolster the description of your products. Customers are very savvy nowadays and they understand that a lot of the language you use in the product description is simply designed to make a sale. However, if they see that fellow customers bought this product and are satisfied with it, they are 12 times more likely to buy that particular product. Since there is so much emphasis placed on review, you need to be aware of what customers are saying about your business and make the necessary adjustments if you notice increased negative comments. 

Also we have to keep in mind that not all reviews are genuine. Business owners understand the great importance of reviews for the overall success of their ecommerce platform and will often solicit fake reviews or even leave false negative feedback on competitors’ products. While there are separate AI products that deal with the problem of fake reviews, sentiment analysis could help you identify some of the false reviews that exist about your products and alert you that such a problem exists. 

Mindy Support is Assisting the Development of  Accurate Sentiment Analysis Tools 

In order to create a sentiment analysis system that could accurately identify the customer’s mood in each statement, a lot of data annotation is necessary to train the system to understand all of the nuances and meanings of the words and phrases. Mindy Support has extensive experience actualizing large-scale data annotation projects and can perform such time-consuming tasks for you. We have more than 2,000 employees in six locations all over Ukraine which allows us to source and recruit candidates quickly to help you meet deadlines. All of the work will be done on time and we have rigorous QA processes in place to make sure that everything is done correctly the first time, which avoids the hassles of having to redo some of the work. 

Posted by Il’ya Dudkin