Princy Lalawat
Every day hundreds of young minds wake up to ideas which could change their life. Ideas on which they want to spend their most precious years and earn a happy living. But if that was the case, we would have more than a billion start-ups rising each day to cross the previously build horizons of success. So, did you ever bothered to throw a little light on what exactly went wrong with those hundreds of minds? NO. Nobody matters to us rather than our own self and this would probably bring us more into the vicious circle of not attaining success.
People fail and we do fail; that’s an unavoidable cycle.
But yes there’s always an option to learn something from our past and grow more in the future. That’s where we lack. We fail and we give up and never again try to put our feet into the same. From where we could have managed to grow once again, we leave it always as an extra added curse. Same has happened and will continue to happen if we keep on neglecting signals which are not only meant to improve us but to ensure if the system itself is comfortable with it.
‘Customer is our God!’
Customers take up the biggest bite of shares of any startup or any organization. Without customers, we would end up owning nothing. They are our game changers. Customers are those pillars who play a vital role to determine who should rule the market. So, customers occupy the top position in the checklist of every business and thus each entrepreneur should take care of what customers he is targeting; are the customers comfortable. No business has run without this analysis and in the upcoming years, no business would start without this analysis. Sentiment Analysis is one of those supreme analysis done to get settled in the market.
For the newbie’s mind, Sentiment Analysis is nothing but opinion mining which focuses on the extraction of sentiments behind any text. It uses the very popular Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing every business focuses on characterization of how the intended customers are reacting.
Sentiment Analysis has a wider arena of questions to let every wanna-be-entrepreneur think upon and act wisely. I have listed some of the most emphasized and must be answered questions below to let you gain more insight on this.
- Whether customers are satisfied or not?
- What does their tweet mean?
- Are they comfortable with what we’re providing?
- Are they enjoying the brand new campaign?
- What more can be done to solve their problems?
SA is all about gathering information on various backgrounds to set a well-targeted goal to achieve. As a targeted person is hard to hit, so is the business which has already set new milestones to reach. I would rather go the informal way to make you more comfortable with this topic as you are one of those customers; I’m selling my writing to.
Let’s say you tried your hands on manufacturing side with a dream to ace the ruling manufacturers. You designed a mobile say suppose. You took the best features of every existing model and combined them one to make your customers happier. Obviously, who would not want that big smile on his customer’s face? You thought of targeting all those existing loopholes and made the best product.
Related Read: How to Cut Costs as a Startup?
Now the actual story starts. Nowadays the online market is the best place to start anything. You got your smartphone featured on all e-commerce giants. The first day sales were low but gave you a small motivation to continue. You marketed very well and continued for the next 2 days. At the end of the grand shopping days, you found that not much people purchased or opt for your smart-phone but yes a few were in.
Now as the festive season continues after a 6 months gap, you were again ready to get featured. But unfortunately, this festive season also didn’t help you turn minds.
What do you think was your point of failure?
Whom do you hold responsible for not so overwhelming response?
Like you turned each check-list bullet to higher priorities and prepared the best out of all in the market, but still, no response signifies what?
Why are people not turning in? And then suddenly there’s an ocean of questions being thrown up all over the social media and amidst your own mind. Small things might end up taking your sleep away. Then this was something you worked for the entire year and still didn’t make it through. You must be aware of all the concrete data but what about the subjective data? Did you even bother to take care of that? It might happen you stepped into this field and were carried away by any other thing. And so the major setback this field of subjective data has put will take away your mind.
- Specifications and price are those pillars you worked onto
- But is the design handy was not even looked after
- Why aren’t people dying to purchase was thought of
- But what made them decide not to buy was never an area of your priority
- It should have the latest android version
- But does that support the other drivers embedded was another untouched area
And this was how you ended up with low sales. The fields which seemed to be a major focus of all leading manufacturers were yours also, but what you lack were those extra efforts to gather sentiments of your customers. This is perhaps a backend thing every manufacturer did and you were not aware of. Rather than getting all latest features, if you would have worked a bit on the client side, better conclusions would have come up.
It’s very difficult to survey the entire market and come up with strong points on why people didn’t buy your product. Rather it’s simple and very effective to study what opinions did the market specialist and those few people carry. Reading blogs, tweets and social media posts would have helped you a lot. Reviews are those columns which decide your outcome. And this entire thing you didn’t work on was Sentiment Analysis. You went ahead to take a pie of the best cake but lacked the knowledge of how to take it. SA has got those insights and applications which not only cover the entire market’s reviews but help us know areas to focus on. Not only in business but SA can be very helpful in other fields such as politics/political science; law/policy making; sociology and psychology as well.
Related Read: Everybody Is NOT Your Customer
Remember: “Humans are creatures based upon subjective matters and hence opinions are indispensable.”
Now that you have a proper understanding of what goals Sentiment Analysis has, let’s have a look at how these can be beneficial in customer service.
Sentiment analysis comes out to be a long-planned tool which could bring out strategies like never before. It will target the most untouched areas and help increase the overall growth of any organization whether it may be customer acquisition, attribution or parameters which didn’t seem to play any role until now.
Sentiments are not about positive or negative reviews it’s beyond that. It’s about cross domains, non-related categories, and characteristics which do not acquire the cream layer of any business. Things which are not related are often very tough to crack and hence implementing SA is a task, not every is mastered at.
Challenges such as people expressing opinions in complex and non-identical ways; lexical content alone can be misleading; negations and off-topic discussions are hard to handle. Moreover sarcasm, irony, and implication might lead to depressing levels. There are a hundred of categories to specify yet very few have got a proper solution. Texts, statements or tweets need a proper approach to deal with.
Data-driven strategies are thus a must to handle the thrown pieces of texts everywhere on the web. Previously used strategies made things 80% accurate but the 20% they lacked have captured the entire market now. Sentiment-oriented datasets are highly domain specific and bring out a wide understanding of how the customers are reacting. Machine learning is basically a cognitive approach. The NLP technique lets you pick out words and categorize them based upon the surrounding text. And the error ratio solely depends on how perfect the algorithm is. We just need an automation approach to filter out the various blogging sites, tech-review blogs, videos and all other social media. As the world expands virtually, sentiment analysis and natural language processing have huge growth options and we’re just at the starting edge.
Sentiments are beyond reliability. Importance of expressions is the next big market opportunity each should focus on. But yes, a mountain can’t be moved in a single day and barriers can’t be removed out of every way. So is the case with the future of Sentiment Analysis. It’s the newborn baby who needs spoon feeding to grow into a mature person. Because hopes, anxieties and expressions have no measuring meters and are prone to change every single minute.
Also Read: 5 Most Common Financial Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make