People take purchase decisions
based on their perception about a product, service, individual, or entity
irrespective of its source, validity, and authenticity. Perception is often
born out of a sentiment and can have consequences on a product’s or brand’s
credibility and reputation. Thanks to this predominant attribute that drives
customer behavior, even a superior quality product can bite the dust in the
sweepstakes of business. Moreover, in today’s omnichannel business landscape,
sentiment-driven brand perception plays a significant role in achieving
business objectives.
Since customer sentiment can
either make a product or service acceptable or disowned by its end-users,
analyzing the same can accrue key insights for the marketers and help them
deliver positive outcomes. Customer sentiment analysis can be made a part of quality
assurance process wherein automated tools are used to mine emotions
from the text and other channels.
What is
customer sentiment analysis?
Sentiment analysis is a process
in which opinions of the end-users of a brand, business, product, or service
are mined to obtain business-critical feedback. Here, the emotions and
attitudes of the end-users are analyzed through their conversations, voice
inflections, and language. It is a highly useful tool that can be used in
numerous areas, such as on social media platforms to understand customer
sentiments on a product campaign.
How does
customer sentiment analysis work?
Driven by an algorithm, customer
sentiment analysis or customer
experience testing strategy measures factors like the level
of stress in the voice of a customer and his or her rate of speech to determine
his or her sentiment, attitude, and opinion about a product, brand, service,
topic, organization, event or individual. It can be used to refine processes
and deliver better personalized experiences across channels leading to loyalty,
retention, and new customer acquisition.
How
customer sentiment analysis can address the customer needs
Testing
customer experience is
important to enhance the quality of a product or service according to the
actual needs of the customer. In today’s competitive business environment where
customer experience has become the ultimate determining factor to make a
product or service successful, customer sentiment analysis as part of quality assurance cannot be
overlooked. The benefits derived from this exercise are as follows:
# Provides
customer insight: Businesses
need to study the customer experiences to know how their products or services
fare in the market. They can do so by employing tools for CX testing and gain insights into what
customers think about their products or services. If the sentiments are
negative, businesses can identify the reasons or factors behind them and work
towards mitigating them. The knowledge of customer sentiments can help
businesses to add new features and/or functionalities to their products or
services and curate better plans to conduct future campaigns.
# Offers
proactive business solutions: Customer sentiment analysis as a part of quality assurance and testing can
help businesses to make informed decisions, draw better strategies, and set up
realistic targets. Specific tools can offer proactive business solutions in the
form of automatic reports, event analysis, etc. These can help businesses to
understand the emotions behind positive, negative, or neutral opinions about
specific products or services. Furthermore, it can help marketers to evaluate
the impact of launch campaigns on customers and identify the specific
demographic segment(s) where the interest or awareness about the product or
service is the highest.
# Measures
the success of any marketing campaign: The measure of any marketing campaign is not limited to the
number of likes, followers, or comments alone. It also encompasses the number
of discussions (positive or otherwise) elicited by customers about the brand,
product, or service. By combining the numerical and non-numerical data
generated through customer sentiment analysis, businesses can measure the ROI
of their marketing campaign.
#
Eliminates gaps in customer experience: Customer sentiments need to be measured holistically and not
pigeonholed into multichannel like phone, email, chatbot, social media, etc. In
other words, data for customer experience need to be collected holistically for
the entire customer journey - initial awareness to repeat purchases. This will
help to analyze the data more accurately and aid businesses to remove the gaps
in customer experience.
Conclusion
Software quality assurance is not only about enhancing the
quality of a product or service during the SDLC. It is also about obtaining
data on customer experience by using specific tools for customer sentiment
analysis. By determining the customer sentiment about a brand, product or
service, businesses can improve their processes, delivery mechanism, not to
speak of the quality of products or services. Although it is still an emerging
area, businesses should utilize it to know more about their customers and to
derive better success with their deliverables.
Author Bio
Oliver has been associated with Cigniti
Technologies Ltd as an Associate Manager - Content Marketing, with over 10
years of industry experience as a Content Writer in Software Testing &
Quality Assurance industry. Cigniti is a Global Leader in Independent Quality
Engineering & Software Testing Services with CMMI-SVC v1.3, Maturity Level
5.
This article is originally published on medium.com.
