Dubai is a central hub for business activities in the region and providing a doorway to access Africa, Middle East, Asia and European markets. Major cities in UAE like Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah and other emirates are home to international commerce, trade and businesses. It is due to the super business-friendly government policies, world-class infrastructure and dynamic business landscape which is attracting thousands of investors every year. This makes UAE a great business hub, thus also raising the competition. In general the customers have higher purchase power, they are more tech savvy and highly demanding. Every increasing customer needs and highly competitive markets demand businesses to be more aligned with customers by acquiring deeper understanding of customer sentiments. Offering high-quality products and services alone is not enough for success, businesses must have to align themselves with customer needs, desires, and expectations. Businesses often invest huge amount of resources in improving internal processes, adding features to their products, introducing new services and enhancing customer experience. However, most of the time businesses are making such decisions on the bases of experts’ opinion, competitive market research and various other factors, while totally undermining the customer sentiments. Which sometime could cause huge failures too. In this blog we will discuss how businesses can understand customer sentiments by implementing a good customer feedback system.
What is Customer Sentiment Analysis?
A customer sentiment analysis is a systematic approach of understanding and interpreting the customer attitude, emotions and opinions a customer shared or expressed towards your brand, employees, products, services or his/her overall experience with your business. It is a much deeper understanding of customer feedback than that of what we usually do. When it comes to customer feedback businesses often thinks of collecting feedback data using various manual or digital channels such as printed feedback forms, happiness meter, NPS Score, social media polls, or rating at a website. However, the customer sentiment analysis is collecting all that data, running it through a system and understanding how the customer actually feels while sharing a certain opinion. The primary objective of performing a customer sentiment analysis is to understand how your customers feel about a particular aspect of your business such as new product features, customer wait time, service quality, online self-service channel, etc. Thus the customer sentiment analysis goes beyond tradition categorization of customer feedback such as positive, negative or neutral and offers a much deeper, accurate and better understanding of customer sentiments, enabling businesses to make more informed decisions and raise their chances of success.
How Customer Sentiment Analysis is Different from Traditional Customer Feedback?
The customer feedback collection is a common practice, businesses regularly ask customers about their feedback, suggestions or opinion. Usually a customer experience manager is in charge of executing the customer feedback drive. Business often go for a closed-loop customer feedback collection method which is much better at building relationship and increasing customer engagements. However, all traditional customer feedback methods lack in providing a deeper understanding of customer sentiments. This doesn’t mean the customer sentiment analysis is a completely different process, no, it is same as collecting customer feedback, but the major difference is at how you process the feedback data. Here are some key components of customer sentiment analysis which distinguish it from traditional customer feedback management processes:
- Text Mining: This is the most common sentiment analysis method, it enables businesses to collect valuable insights from textual feedbacks, such as survey responses, suggestions, customer reviews, social media interactions, and all other textual forms of customer feedback.
- Natural Language Processing or NLP Analysis: That is a modern and one of the most complex form of analysis, it uses modern AI (artificial intelligence) and smart algorithms to analyze written or spoken feedback and provide context, sentiments, and semantics of the feedback data.
- Contextual Analysis: A contextual analysis is done using advanced analysis tools and certain feedback techniques which enable businesses to understand the actual context in which the customer has expressed certain sentiments to avoid misinterpretation.
- Sentiment Classifications: Once collecting customer feedback data and analyzing it to identify different sentiments, we must classify them in certain pre-define categories. These categories are more granular then just positive, negative or neutral and help taking right decisions.
- Machine Learning (ML): This is one of the most modern sentiment analysis technique, usually medium and large sized businesses implement it. An AI model is used for this analysis which is trained to identify patterns and sentiment indicators from a large feedback database.
In simple words, understanding customer sentiments is crucial for a business to acquire actionable insights that effectively aligns their strategic decisions with the customer needs, expectations, and desires. Businesses can leverage customer sentiment analysis to improve their products, services, customer experience, brand perception and reputation and for predictive insights. This is what makes customer sentiment analysis far more effective than traditional customer feedback management.
The Transformation of Customer Feedback Systems
The customer feedback systems have completely transformed over the time, starting from a paper-pen based printed feedback forms it has now become a more comprehensive and complex digital platform. Which not only enhance customer feedback system but also offer a more engaging and seamless customer experience. Primarily the customer feedback systems were designed to monitor and measure customer satisfaction, however, over the course of time, the customer feedback management itself have transformed into a more complex and comprehensive business process. Therefore businesses took advantage of digitalization and automation by implementing modern customer feedback system, which are providing more detailed customer feedback data, with highest level of accuracy and convenience. In past the customer feedback was collected through the paper forms, which were then processed, and the data was digitalized, mostly excel sheets were used. The customer experience manager or relevant person had to perform the analysis manually in excel or any other program of their choice. This means from collecting the feedback to converting it into actionable insights, it could take weeks or even months if the data is large enough.
However, with the advancement of technology the modern customer feedback systems are able to collect, store, process and analyze the customer feedback data in real-time. All branches or touch points can be connected through a centralized customer feedback management system. This also allow integrating more digital channels such as touchscreens and tablets, emails, online surveys, SMS, WhatsApp, web forms and even social media and several other online channels. It is this ability to integrate the customer interaction from many channels into a single cohesive and centralized platform, makes modern customer feedback systems superior. Furthermore the rise of digital communication channels and ever-changing customer preferences also encourage businesses to adopt to a multi-dimensional and diverse feedback management system. The ability to collect customer feedback data and provide real-time analysis, reports and insight is incredible. Businesses can leverage it to greatly improve customer relationship and gain their trust. Real-time customer feedback data and reporting can greatly enhance visibility and provide management more time and room to take effective actions. Therefore a modern customer feedback system is essential for customer feedback management and customer sentiment analysis.
Why Customer Feedback System is Essential for Customer Sentiment Analysis?
Think of reading out hundreds of customer comments on social media, or emails, or think of reading out hundreds of feedback forms, and then analyzing the data to get accurate understanding of customer sentiments. Will it be possible, no, it won’t. One can only read and comprehend handful of feedbacks by just reading them, but if your feedback dataset consists of hundreds if not thousands of feedbacks and as many are coming from two different channels, or even it could be from 8 to 10 different channels, it is absolutely impossible for a human being to read out all those feedbacks and understand the insight. That can only be done with the aid of a computer or specialized program. A modern customer feedback system does the same. It is capable of collecting thousands of feedbacks from various different sources, classifying and categorizing them automatically using smart algorithms, performing several analysis on the feedback data and producing actionable reports within blink of an eye. That is why a customer feedback system is absolutely essential for modern customer feedback management and understanding customer sentiments analysis. It is not only about the size of the data, but different communication channels offer different types of feedback and different levels of details and context which is why a comprehensive framework is necessary which can systematically process the feedback data and provide valuable insight for strategic decision making.
Conclusion
In the modern business landscape, especially in competitive markets like of Dubai, Sharjah, Abu Dhabi and other UAE regions, a business must have to have a deeper and accurate understanding of customer sentiments in order to align its strategic decisions with customer needs, desires and expectations. The traditional customer feedback management methods have lost their significance, although they could still be valuable to some extent but fall short on providing deeper understanding of customer sentiments. Businesses must have to understand what customer likes, what they don’t like, what their pain points are and what they are expecting. Therefore businesses need a comprehensive framework to manage customer feedback which can collect feedback data from various channels, consolidate it into a single database, and allow management to perform analysis and produce intuitive reports to actively include customer feedback in their decision making processes.
The evolution of customer feedback system from a simple printed feedback forms to a sophisticated digital and smart software-based platform indicates the importance and value of customer sentiments. In this blog we have briefly discussed why business need to understand customer sentiments and why a digital customer feedback system is the only tool to achieve that. If you want to learn more about the subject or if you want our help to implement a bespoke customer feedback system for your business, please feel free to contact us through our Contact Us page or leave a comment in the comment box below and we will get in touch with you soon.