Sentiment Analysis Sucks
Digitally native businesses know the importance of reviews. Reviews drive or kill your conversion rate. With a feedback mechanism in place, you can help customers who had a bad experience with your business.
Many companies are running sentiment analysis on their product or customer service feedback. But this isn’t enough. Sentiment analysis gives you the binary answer GOOD/BAD, or at best a range TERRIBLE/BAD/OK/GOOD/GREAT.
Sentiment analysis is especially useless on most of today’s online platforms (AirBnB, Amazon, Yelp, the Apple and Android App stores, etc…) because sentiment is already known and doesn’t need to be calculated. (1* reviews have a negative sentiment and 5* reviews have a positive sentiment, with rare outliers.)
What will you do with your data if you find that 50% of people liked the restaurant and 50% didn’t? What if 90% of people liked your restaurant and 10% didn’t?
What Business Decisions Can I Make With This??
With sentiment data, you can’t do anything except fix the past, reaching out 1-by-1 to past customers, trying to improve their experience and hopefully getting them to improve their reviews…
But The End Goal Shouldn’t Be Better Reviews…
If you can get in contact with the customer, you’ll just send a multitude of emails like this, either personally written (too much time) or using a template (too impersonal)…
This is where Sentiment Analysis gets you…
The end goal shouldn’t be fixing the 10% of you reviews with a negative sentiment. The end goal should be better products, better services and a better business so that you increase your customer base with less marketing, more word-of-mouth, and more organic 5* reviews.
Positive reviews are a lagging indicator of a good business. Better products, services and processes are the less-obvious leading indicator.
You need to understand WHY the customer feedback is negative, diving beyond Good/Bad quantitative data into the qualitative data your customers provide.
Once you understand the qualitative data, you can design better products to sell in your e-commerce store, improve your AirBnB rental, rethink your restaurant experience, or build an app that’s more addicting than Clash of Clans.