Find out what your customers really think with sentiment analysis

“Sentiment analysis is a brand of Natural Language Processing (NLP) which identifies, extracts, quantifies and studies affective states and subjective information” – Microsoft

In basic terms, it’s an algorithm which gives you insight into the attitudes of people interacting with your business, trawling through social media feeds to do so. Businesses can use it to understand how customers feel about a product or service via social media – hence the term sentiment analysis. It has also been coined as ‘Emotion AI’, ‘Sentiment Tracking’ and ‘Opinion Mining’.

As a business, sentiment analysis is a sure fire way to see what people are saying about you.

How does it work?

NLP processes computer systems that process human language, apply meaning to statements and then ranks the statements. The ranking works on a 1-10 scale, defined by Negative, Neutral or Positive.

The tone of messages are then ranked as Negative, Neutral or Positive on a 1-10 ranking scale.

In short, Natural Language Processing is the way computers understand and manipulate human language. It’s a goldmine if you want to know what your customers are saying about you. And what brand doesn’t want to know that?

Sentiment analysis may be considered by most as the domain of data analysts and scientists, however that’s not necessarily the case.

Why should I do it?

Well, you do want to know what your users are saying about you, right?

If you found out your product was making users frustrated whilst they were using it, you would likely want to make reparations. This is exactly what sentiment analysis enables you to do. See what’s going wrong in the user journey and why, and make improvements. Your customers will love you even more for it.

How can I do it?

Perhaps surprisingly, you may already have access to the right tools in place to set up and conduct your own sentiment analysis.

Through 3 Microsoft products, you can set up, track and visualise customer sentiment:

– Microsoft Azure cognitive services: this runs the algorithms to get out the results
– Microsoft Flow: extract Twitter feeds and connect with Azure Text Analytics and insert data into Power BI
– Power BI Stream Analytics: easily visualise data