Customer Sentiment – A Competitive Advantage

17 May Customer Sentiment – A Competitive Advantage

Customer sentiment is today’s “word de jour” for a reason as the stakes are high in today’s age of customer service, where brand loyalty is at risk and reputations’ easily tarnished on line or even ruined by series of keystrokes in social media.

Sentiment refers to the emotion behind a social media mention. It’s a way to measure the tone of the conversation—is the person happy, annoyed, angry? Sentiment adds important context to social conversations. Without it, measurement of mentions alone could be misleading. If you were measuring mentions for your company’s new product, you might assume a surge in mentions meant it was being well received. After all, more mentions = more people talking about the product. But what if all those mentions were negative?

Measuring sentiment will help you understand the overall feeling surrounding a particular subject, enabling you to create a broader and more complete picture of the social conversations that matter to you.

Time is money In both B2B and B2C worlds where the business benefit of a sentiment strategy cannot be understated – the ability to capture, measure and validate sales marketing campaigns in Real Time to change course, alter and optimize advertising spend where 5% increase in retention can lead to a 25-100% increase in profit.

The use of the term “Real Time” has become all pervasive and encompassing  in the lexicon  of the Big Data world  it has lost its original meaning. In truth, all Hadoop Platforms ingest structured and unstructured data in real time. However when it come to visualization, query manipulation and access to the resulting analytic report or dashboard, a parallel real time platform or stand alone version is required to deliver the holy grail of true real time analytics.

In the absence of a real time platform, traditional batch file transfers processes are used to query data sets which can be displayed in near real time or whatever number you are in the processing queue. In addition, real time platforms allow for analysis on the fly, even the ability to change queries and merge data sets from other sources for presentation all in real time.

The movie “The Interview” was about to be released online, a leading company in the digital transport space had no real time method to capture sentiment about its service or content being delivered over its network. The overriding concern of the company was to provision their network for this worldwide event and to gauge the public sentiment given all the notoriety and unprecedented publicity – some of it very negative vis a vis its own brand

To prepare a Proof of Concept (POC) was commissioned and integration with Twitter was established as a source to capture sentiment. 20,000 hits were captured in first 10 minutes using keyword search analytics. This information allowed the Network to perform as designed with only minor changes –  the movie was an online sensation and the company was able to prepared for any fallout to preserve and safeguard its brand.

Since Big Data technology ingests and provides clarity to both structured and unstructured data, companies can now benefit from an array of information in easy to use self serve report building dashboards providing a 360 degree view of the business serving all functional areas with meaningful, insightful and predictive information. This is a new competitive advantage which not only results in better decision making but also a *6 to 9% increase in profitability.