Well-established businesses receive massive amounts of feedback every day, and this is obtained through eCommerce platforms, customer support calls, emails, social media platforms, bots, and chats. This presents companies with substantial opportunity to collect large amounts of customer data and enhance market intelligence.

Voice of the customer (VoC) is the practice of collecting, analyzing, and distributing customer feedback to improve a product, solution, or service. With accurate VoC data, businesses can enhance customer experience (CX), meet unmet needs in the marketplace, and differentiate themselves from their competitors. Companies can unlock VoC through technologies such as sentiment analysis, which uses natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), text analysis, and computational linguistics to identify the opinion, intent, or emotion behind the natural language. Through the use of specific words, tone, and the context of the conversation, sentiment analysis engines can recognize emotions and sentiments in customer-business interactions.

Sentiment analysis tools can identify 3 characteristics: topic–what is a comment addressing?; opinion–does the speaker hold a favorable or an unfavorable opinion?; and emotion–what are the customers’ emotions and sensitivities? (emotions can range from happiness, excitement, and contentment to anger, annoyance, and irritation).

Sentiment analysis is redefining the VoC landscape, and it complements surveys and other traditional solicited feedback methods. The implementation of sentiment analysis brings several benefits to organizations, including the potential to increase RoI, revenue, and cost savings; the ability to increase customer retention; and the capability to offer an enhanced CX. In addition, VoC platforms can generate automated, complex, and actionable insights that will change the ways businesses operate. Advancements in AI and IoT and higher sentiment analysis adoption will guarantee a bright future for VoC tools.