Where will you focus your brand if you have the hindsight that 75 per cent of consumers around the world desire more human interaction and that 65 per cent of US consumers believe a positive CX is more authentic than advertising?
E-commerce has come of age but, one thing that is going to tilt the scale more in favour of electronic commerce is the COVID-19 pandemic.
The post-COVID-19 world promises a lot of radical changes and more transactions will have to be through the internet. This does not, however, mean that you can just fold your arms and expect customers to flood your site, you must do all that is necessary to engage them.
Getting customer feedback is very important for any e-commerce business, especially now that the business world is becoming more customer-centric. In the world of big data, the essential thing is not just to have the data but to make meaningful insight out of the data at your disposal.
While you can get online reviews of your product from review sites and social media, you need to understand that the data you get from these channels are mostly unstructured. To gain any reasonable insight out of this data, you may have to devote hours of manual labour.
The integration of machine learning into sentiment analysis using product review data can be exemplified by the way one Asian brand identified that packaging experience was a major star rating driver for their snacks. Their consumers offered feedback that is intrinsic to the product, such as the propensity for crisp to break and become crumbs before consumption. This made the company change its packaging and the result was an increase of 0.53 per cent in its star rating. The brand has been seeing more sales and fewer bad reviews in the Asian market since then.
Sentiment analysis is greatly changing the face of e-commerce, and you need to leverage this to enhance an improved customer experience as well as reduce cart abandonment.
So, in what ways can you deploy sentiment analysis using product review data to change your e-commerce experience.
Brand monitoring
How often do you give a thought to the fact that customers love being heard? You must listen to what they say about your brand. Your customer is not a paid influencer and has got no reason to tell lies. Rather, customers are very objective in their criticisms about a product or service.
Whenever they talk about your brand, it gives your company the chance to get a glimpse of their sentiment towards your brand and your products. Deploying sentiment analysis using Natural Language Processing and machine learning, will enable you to categorise their comments into negative, positive, or neutral.
While you will like positive comments, you must also realise that negative comments are to make you buckle up and change things your customers may not see in the same light as you.
Improving your customer support
According to McKinsey, more than 25 per cent of customers drop a product or brand due to just one bad customer service experience. This one bad product review can cost you heavy loss with the rise of social media, forums, and opinions. You can, however, give your customer service (CX) team a veritable insight with sentiment analysis on what problems are in the offing.
When you have a lot of criticisms of your product, it’s an opportunity for your customer support team to use the different views to put together a strategy to straighten out whatever complaints your customers have.
Sentiment analysis using product review data can also help your CX team understand how your customers feel at different phases of the buying journey. This can help them to be more personable with customers, drive sales, and boost ROI.
Understanding the competition better
How do your customers perceive your brand when they compare it with your competitors? Sentiment analysis using customer review product data will allow you to understand how the competition is doing in the market. If you monitor reviews of your brand and your competitors, you can have an insight into how your products or marketing campaigns are performing against theirs.
Having the reviews is not enough, you need to know when to leverage their mistakes to score. This can only be possible if you deploy sentiment analysis. Even if what you are getting is majorly negative, that’s a good opportunity for you to make amends.
Providing better product analytics
With sentiment analysis, it is becoming easier for brands to have a better grasp of their product analytics, and this can enable you to understand what your customers dislike and what they want. It’s also possible for you to create marketing campaigns to target certain groups who may have shown interest in a specific characteristic of your product.
Sentiment analysis can also enhance the opportunity of changing an idea you have believed was great but did not go down well with your customers.
The most interesting part of sentiment analysis using product review data is that the comments customers make come freely and are authentic views. If you seriously work on these views, you may end up adding a touch they will greatly appreciate, which you never thought was possible, to your product or brand.
If you have a few negative comments on social media, you may not need to do a turnaround, but when your sentiment tracking finds out that a majority of your customers are asking for it, it’s an indicator that you must listen.
Keeping up with happenings in the market
It’s possible you just want to come into the market and don’t know where to start, or you want to launch a new product. If so, you need to keep up with happenings in the market. Sentiment analysis will afford you the opportunity of knowing what your target audience feels about your product in the first weeks, days, or even hours after launch.
This is highly crucial, if you have a good insight into the feelings of your potential customers, you will save your brand a lot of resources that can easily go waste.
Ability to handle crisis better
There is always the possibility that a crisis will occur; the important thing, however, is to efficiently manage the crisis. Sentiment analysis will give you the leverage to know when things are going out of hand. Being able to track opinions in real-time will enable you to evaluate the degree of damage that may arise and how to prioritise resources.
Your customers will feel a sense of belongingness any time you quickly address their pain points. Bing customer-centric entails that you resolve their issues faster. You have the opportunity of further injecting positivity back into the brand.
Source: e27
