10 Ways Sentiment Analysis Can Help You Achieve Your Business Goals In 2021!

Voice of the Customer (VoC) and Voice of the Employee (VoE) are two important sentiment analysis applications and strategic tactics that can help drive your business goals. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic created a very challenging business environment for text analytics. At the same time, hard economic times can often be one of the greatest motivators of innovative strategic thinking. As we cross the one-year mark of our first lockdown, I thought it would be a good idea to review ten ways that sentiment analysis can be a driving force in helping you achieve your business goals in 2021.

What is sentiment analysis in business?

Sentiment analysis is an essential tool that empowers your business to understand the experiences and opinions of your customers or employees. It applies machine learning and text analytics to identify, extract and score text data as expressing feelings/opinions that are positive, negative, or neutral. Sentiment analysis can be applied to any unstructured text data like social media posts, survey answers, live chat, or call center transcripts. You can even use this tool to extract insights from videos from YouTube or TikTok.

What is Voice of the Customer?

Voice of the Customer (VoC) provides your customers the opportunity to have an impact on the way you improve your products, services, and business. It is the cornerstone of putting the customer first in every strategic move you make as a company. By using sentiment analysis in business, you can extract your customers’ feelings, ideas, and opinions from surveys, social media, and reviews. You can then take these insights and apply them to how you plan to achieve your goals in 2021.

5 ways to use Voice of the Customer sentiment analysis to achieve your 2021 goals

1. Improve Customer Service:

Improving your customer service is essential for any business. For many companies, it is the core of their offering. This is why it is crucial to listen to your customers more closely by analyzing customer service transcripts using sentiment analysis. It will help you determine those areas that your business needs to improve in to drive positive customer sentiment and reduce negative feelings.

2. Increase Website Traffic:

Customer feedback is crucial to enhancing their responsiveness to your content. Whether you are using SEM or SEO to drive your site traffic, basic response data will tell you which creative is working better. But it cannot tell you why. By applying sentiment analysis to site visitors’ survey responses, you can unearth the reasons why people chose to click on the ads that they did. You can then take these insights to inform your future ad messaging to make them more effective.

3. Conduct a SWOT Analysis:

Sentiment analysis in business can help you research your brand, those of your competitors, and the overall industry. Applying sentiment analysis to news articles and reviews can unearth business insights that can inform your SWOT analysis with real market insights and not just management assumptions or speculation.

4. Develop a New Product:

Sometimes one of the best ways for a company to thrust itself back into the spotlight is to launch a new product that provides a solution to an emerging consumer need. The best way to begin developing new product features is to use qualitative and quantitative customer research and then Voice of the Customer sentiment analysis to responses. This will quickly and accurately empower you to identify those proposed features that customers appreciate most and those that they value less.

5. Improve Your Marketing Campaigns:

Marketing is all about content, messaging, and channels. One of the ways of measuring the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns is to analyze consumer responses to the ads you place across social media. Gauging overall audience sentiment can provide vital insights into whether the investment you made was worth it or not. It can also inform you as to why they liked it, and why they did not.

Learn more about developing your own voice of the customer program.

What is Voice of the Employee?

Voice of the Employee (VoE) is a business initiative that gives employee-feedback strategic importance in improving business performance. It involves using sentiment analysis in business by providing employees different ways to express their feelings about a variety of themes, topics, and corporate initiatives. This can be done using staff surveys, one-on-one meetings, etc. Empowering VoE is great to help you achieve your company’s business goals.

5 ways to use Voice of the Employee to achieve your 2021 goals

1. Cut Unnecessary Costs:

The challenge in cutting unnecessary costs is knowing which specific areas should be considered unnecessary. An innovative yet obvious way is to ask employees. You can accomplish this by using sentiment analysis to review verbatim employee survey answers. You can break down the positive and negative employee feelings toward specific areas of savings. This will provide you efficient strategy with data-driven, shop-floor insights.

2. Increase Productivity:

The flip side to cutting costs is looking for ways to be more efficient in productivity. Employees can often be the main source for innovative ideas to boost production with greater efficiency. Just like Voice of the Customer sentiment analysis, applying sentiment analysis to VoE can determine which ideas are most likely to succeed by knowing how employees, management, and the leadership feel about them.

3. Improve Your Employer Brand:

One of the main goals for your business is attracting and retaining talented employees. One of the pivotal ways of doing this is by improving your employer-brand reputation. Present and past staff often post the way they feel about the companies they work for and whether those organizations are well-managed, trusting, and motivating. After all, your employer brand is the way others perceive your company as a place to work and develop a career. Gain relevant insights by applying sentiment analysis to employer reviews on sites like Glassdoor.

4. Offer a New Employee Incentive:

If done right, offering a fresh, new employee incentive, can be very effective in promoting staff engagement, productivity, and morale. It is very important that the content of the incentive is relevant to your staff, and that the goals you set are achievable. To optimize the response to a new incentive, do the upfront work of soliciting employee feedback when you’re developing the idea. Then use sentiment analysis results to help you predict the likelihood of its success in motivating desired behaviors.

5. Create an Employee Recognition Program:

As more people work remotely, keeping staff engaged and the morale high has become a new challenge. It’s easy for employees to lose motivation or focus, now that their teams are not around them to collaborate with. Creating an employee recognition program is a great way to honor your best employees and to show them that you appreciate their efforts on your behalf. Apply sentiment analysis API to their feedback and recommendations on the program, so your program is effective in rewarding employees who go beyond even when working from home.

Leanr more about top features of employee experince platform.

Concluding Thoughts

My experience in sales and marketing has informed my view that when you are looking to create growth in a tough marketplace, one of the best solutions is to think creatively and begin doing things differently. I hope that these ideas will perhaps give you a fresh outlook on how to approach some of your business goals this year.