The customer journey is a circuitous one, with the path to purchase riddled with distractions at every touchpoint. Understanding where your customer is now and predicting where they’re headed will help you avoid losing them along the way. And Next Generation AI offers a much needed assist on this play!
Pinpointing the Where and Why
Consumer experience data can feel elusive when scouring online data. Are your consumers scrolling through social media, reading or posting reviews, tweeting sarcastic replies to your sincere survey questions, or maybe they’re on your site right now, grilling your under-prepared customer service associate?
The answer is yes – to all. They’re everywhere at once, and that leaves you with a wide array of options to mess up. So that leaves you in a quandary. Where do you start? Everywhere at once, of course.
You need to capture consumer sentiment from a variety of sources, including ratings, reviews, focus groups, surveys, support forums, blogs, and every bit of social media if your brand hopes to understand purchase intent as it happens. It’s all part of the customer journey these days. And that’s not even all of it.
After gathering every bit of that data, you need to incorporate unstructured data, as 90% of the juicy tidbits available online are of the unstructured variety, of course. We’re talking about CRM data, chat logs and other information sets that aren’t easily aggregated or organized – not to mention sentiment! That last bit will get you in trouble if your tool isn’t on-point with its accuracy.
Your brand can skip along unaware of the negative sentiment being thrown your way instead, of course. Just ignore the sarcasm and roll with the punches and hope that your competitors do that too! Or you can be an active participant in the consumer experience journey. (We recommend the latter.) And this feels a good place to note the fact that NetBase is 3X more accurate than the closest competitor!
But what can you do when data isn’t so neatly understood – from sarcasm, emojis, imagery and that messy, unstructured data? Let’s explore that a bit.
Creating Something Out of Nothing Burgers
Once you identified all sources and are ready to bring both structured and unstructured data sources together in one place, you can begin to analyze it and see the big picture.
And this is where Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Next Generation AI capabilities become sentiment analysis differentiators.
Advanced artificial intelligence informs every aspect of NetBase’s customer experience analytics, eliminating data silos and creating a single, unified customer voice – one that you’re unable to hear without such next-level capabilities powering your search. With it, you can:
- Collect, analyze, and correlate all customer data to surface insights with confidence and consistency
- Eliminate errors and reduce the latency for delivering critical insights to the business
- Improve organizational alignment and increase business agility with meaningful customer insights and a unified customer voice
Without it? Well, you can’t have your nothing burger and eat it too, as the saying should go. You’re either tuned in to the importance of this data and making its analysis a priority, or your brand doesn’t think it’s a game changer and devotes little attention to understanding it. Businesses of the savvy variety should continue reading . . .
Understanding context accompanying each bit of consumer data available is very important, as it drives decisions and strategy that affects your entire organization.
It alerts you to where consumers are right now, what they love, hate, wish for – and ways your competitors are getting it right. Or wrong. And every aspect of each attribute is replete with opportunities to attract these consumers, identify new segments and redirect known audiences before their journey ends somewhere else by offering experiences they didn’t even know they wanted – but the sentiment helped predict.
Or even, importantly, to just be aware of who is talking to these folks. Because sometimes it might be someone pretending to be you and ruining all of your hard work!
Get out there an understand your consumer’s path – from the big picture to the granular struggles. You’ll be glad you did – Taco Bell sure is!
Reach out and we’ll show you a demo around tracking trends that will leave you wondering where sentiment analysis (done right) has been all your life.
