Start Using Sentiment Analysis to Gain Invaluable Business Insights

Customer feedback, opinions, and reviews are all important factors in determining how well you are meeting their needs and identifying areas of improvement. While a lot of times the customer will leave a review on the merchant’s website, there is a wide array of other places they can go to vent their frustration or tell their friends and family about how well you are doing. This includes dedicated review sites like Clutch or Angie’s List and can span to include a wide variety of other places like social media, online forums, and many other platforms. Since it can be difficult and time-consuming to track all of this information manually, researchers developed AI-powered sentiment analysis tools to automate this process. 

Since sentiment analysis tools are becoming increasingly used by businesses across industries, let’s take a closer look at how sentiment analysis technology works and what it can do for your business. 

What is Sentiment Analysis and How Does It Work? 

Sentiment analysis detects polarity i.e. positive or negative tone in a given sentence, paragraph, or entire document. The system is trained with a sentiment-labeled data set which will learn the overall sentiment and nuances of human speech. One of the main things the system will need to perform is entity recognition which involves human data annotators to go through the text and label the target entities. This will train the system to recognize specific parts of speech, named entities, and keywords. Then the annotators would need to perform additional work by reading through the text and labeling all of the things we mentioned above so later in it can identify them independently. 

As you can imagine, it takes a lot of data and many hours of data annotation to produce quality training data sets. This is why a lot of companies choose to outsource such tasks to a service provider. 

What are the Benefits of Sentiment Analysis?

Recent data shows that 97% of customers read online business reviews of a local business while 90% of consumers said that a positive review influenced their buying decision. There are many other statistics that show the important role online reviews have, especially given the rise of e-commerce. However, you also need to track all of your company mentions wherever they may occur. In addition to gauging your reputation with your customers, you will also gain access to real-time insights. For example, if you are in the middle of a PR crisis, you can use sentiment analysis tools to understand whether your methods are working effectively and you can make adjustments in real-time as needed. 

Sentiment analysis tools allow you to sort data, like the types mentioned above at scale. If we think about just how much data is out there and all of the channels that could be housing this data, it is just too much information to sort through manually. In fact, large enterprises could be struggling to keep up with all of the data coming from a single channel. For example, large companies could be receiving 30,000 emails from customers and it would not be very efficient from a time and cost standpoint to hire an employee just to read all of those emails. Also, we all have “those days” where it seems like we can’t do anything right and it could be very easy to misinterpret the contents of the message as more negative than it actually is. By removing the human element from this task, you are getting a much more objective view and you will be better able to categorize the information. 

Finally, and perhaps, most importantly, sentiment analysis can help you improve the customer experience. If you are noticing a lot of negative sentiments focused on a particular issue, then you know for a fact that you need to start making changes. Of course, sentiment analysis can also help you show areas where you are doing particularly well. This technology can show you which themes are most widely talked about in positive or negative sentiment and allow you to make the necessary adjustments. 

Mindy Support is Facilitating the Development of New Sentiment Analysis Tools 

With all of the benefits that sentiment analysis tools have to offer, companies are increasingly looking to start implementing them into their business intelligence processes. However, in order to be able to present an accurate picture, it is important that the sentiment analysis systems clearly understand all of the nuances of human speech and can categorize all of the information appropriately. This is where top-quality data annotation work can go a long way since it will help you better train the AI model. 

Mindy Support is taking the time-consuming process of data annotation off the shoulders of researchers. Regardless of the volume of data you need to be annotated, we will assemble a team for you quickly and we will be able to scale your team without sacrificing the quality of the annotation work. Our rigorous QA processes make sure that all of the work is done right the first time, thus avoiding any costs and wasted time of having to redo any of the work. If you are having trouble meeting deadlines or keeping costs under control, contact Mindy Support today to see what we can do for you. 

Posted by Il’ya Dudkin