Despite our highly digitized world – customers still crave real-time connections when they’re looking for answers or attempting to solve a problem. In fact, consumers’ expectations for swift and personalized customer service have grown by 26% in the last two years. Which is why sentiment analysis is fast becoming such a valuable tool for call centers and customer service representatives.
What is Sentiment Analysis?
In essence, sentiment analysis is a digital program that analyzes written and spoken conversations between a business and its customers. It then determines whether the interaction was positive, negative, or neutral. While some sentiment analytics are based on rules that users set beforehand, many others are powered by artificial intelligence (AI). AI-powered sentiment analysis allows the program to grow and learn, giving businesses an improved interaction-to-interaction understanding of their customers’ intentions.
Benefits of AI-based Sentiment Analysis for Contact Centers
Now, some of you may be wondering how sentiment analysis impacts your day-to-day operations. Sure, it sounds like a cutting-edge communications tool, but will you and your employees really benefit from using it? Below we’ve presented four potential use cases for sentiment analysis that will both improve your communications and streamline your internal processes.
1) Evaluate Your Representatives’ Performance
Understanding every customer’s intent is often difficult for contact center agents, especially when they’re dealing with hundreds of calls each day. Sentiment analysis empowers them to automatically decipher and evaluate the quality of the conversation and react accordingly – whether online or over the phone.
Not only that, but sentiment analysis also allows managers to track agent behavior towards customers. Their sentiment analytics will reflect how well they handle difficult conversations, empathize with customers, and understand their needs. This gives managers the tools they need to identify an agent’s strengths and weaknesses and apply appropriate training to help them improve.
2) Improve and Personalize Agent-to-Customer Interactions
As we’ve mentioned before, customers want to be known and understood by businesses. AI-based sentiment analysis uses a dynamic database to ensure your agents are aware of their caller’s sentiments before they even pick up the phone or answer the chat. When tuned into these feelings, your agent can earn that customer’s trust by being empathetic to their needs and communicating accordingly. In a world where one in three consumers will leave a brand they love after just one terrible experience, providing them with the highest quality of support is no longer an option – it’s a requirement.
3) Build Your Brand’s Reputation in the Marketplace
One of the hardest metrics to pin down is how your customers feel about your brand. Yes, you could send out surveys or incentivize customers to leave complimentary reviews. But those efforts usually result in middling responses at best and no responses at worst. When you use sentiment analysis, you can get a firsthand look at how customers are experiencing your brand. Based on that real-time feedback, you can modify your business processes and further customize to meet your customers’ needs.
Sentiment analysis can also positively impact you from a marketing standpoint. Your marketing team can use the data your agents glean to inform their strategies, evaluate their campaigns, and make any necessary changes. This will help you maintain, and even enhance, your business’s positive reputation.
4) Automatically Manage Your Business Processes
If you struggle to update, or even implement, efficient workflows for your employees, sentiment analysis can help! It can help predict and categorize which callers are most in need of assistance or more likely to purchase products and route them to the proper agent. It can also help determine agent schedules. For instance, if a specific category of customers keeps calling in at a specific time, your managers can assign the proper employees to that time.
Implement Sentiment Analysis Today with Axxess Networks
According to a Market Research Future Study, the global market for sentiment analytics is projected to reach $6 billion by the end of 2023. With such explosive growth on the horizon, we’re here to help you get ahead of it with Axxess Networks‘ Unified Communications System for businesses. Our UCaaS offering is equipped with the latest in sentiment analytics, allowing you to better understand and communicate with your customer base. See its impact today by scheduling your free demo!
