Are you a listening brand? Do you know what your customers think about your brand, your products and your services? In order to discover the insights that will allow you to amplify your brand, you need to first know how your customers are currently experiencing your brand—honing in on the ways experience design plays a role in your customers’ overall experience, for example.
How do you do that?
You are probably already getting a lot of customer feedback through social media. But if you want to know what customers really think, your best shot is to dig deeper into your reviews.
REVIEWING THE REVIEWS
You may already be reading reviews, noting how many 5-star and 4-star reviews you’ve received. And maybe as long as you don’t get too many 1- or 2-star reviews, you think you are doing pretty good. But if that’s the extent of your review process, you are missing out on a great opportunity to learn about your customers, what they like, what they don’t like and what they wish you would do differently.
So here’s the truth: The majority of a 5-star review may be positive, but there is probably going to be dissatisfaction about something—even if it is minor. If you don’t know what they are unhappy about, your experience design efforts will suffer.
SENTIMENT ANALYSIS
Natural language processing (NLP) is a rapidly developing field within data analysis and machine learning. NLP algorithms enable the quick, highly accurate analysis of large amounts of text. These algorithms can do in milliseconds what it would take a team of human readers countless hours to accomplish.
In the context of reviews, NLP algorithms are used most often for what has come to be known as “sentiment analysis.” Sentiment analysis seeks to discern whether a given text is positive, neutral or negative, which generally produces a sentiment score. For example, a sentiment analysis may give a particular review a score of 70 percent positive. Although that is a pretty good score, we bet that you will learn far more from understanding the 30 percent that isn’t positive. It is that 30 percent that will enable you to identify opportunities to advance your experience design efforts.
Here at Commit, we believe that digging into the verbatims of reviews is critical for brands that want to produce better experiences for their customers. In the end, your customers will stick with (and spend more with) a brand that delivers great experiences, so shouldn’t that be you?
