What is Sentiment Analysis?

What is sentiment analysis?

Sentiment Analysis, or opinion mining, is the process of detecting positive or negative sentiment in text. It’s often used by businesses to detect sentiment in social data, gauge brand reputation, and understand customers.

Sentiment analysis uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to help you get inside your customers’ heads and find out what they like, dislike, and why.

Why is sentiment analysis important?

Since people express their thoughts and feelings more openly than ever before, sentiment analysis is fast becoming an essential tool to monitor and understand sentiment in all types of data.

Automatically analysing customer feedback, such as opinions in survey responses and social reviews allows businesses to learn what makes customers happy or frustrated, so that they can tailor the experience and service to meet their customers’ needs.

For example, using sentiment analysis to automatically analyse open-ended responses in your guest satisfaction surveys could help you discover why customers are happy or unhappy at each stage of the customer journey.

Maybe you want to track brand sentiment so you can detect disgruntled customers immediately and respond as soon as possible. Maybe you want to compare sentiment from one quarter to the next to see if you need to take action. Then you could dig deeper into your qualitative data to see why sentiment is falling or rising.

What are the benefits?

1. Processing data at scale

Can you imagine manually sorting through thousands of reviews, and customer support conversations, or surveys? There’s just too much data to process manually. Sentiment analysis helps businesses process huge amounts of unstructured data in an efficient and cost-effective way.

2. Improved offering

By keeping an ear out for what people are saying about your menu and service, you can find out what makes them unhappy, and implement improvements that change this attitude.

Sentiment analysis is especially useful when you are launching a new menu and still don’t have enough feedback from your customers.

3. Brand image monitoring

A company’s online reputation is easily one of the most important assets in its success.

It's increasingly common for customers to research venues before choosing to visit them, and if what they find out is not convincing enough, they may skip to the next one in line. This knowledge can help you better position your brand in the marketplace, improve your image, and build a strong digital presence.

For example, if customers are focusing mainly on negative aspects after a visit, you can try to figure out why, and decide on how to best counteract this sentiment. Once you’ve implemented your strategy, you can check whether the mood with your customers has changed, and plan your next move accordingly. And if people are happy with your brand, you can investigate what it is that they love about you, emphasise it, and encourage positive word of mouth.

Practical uses for sentiment analysis in hospitality

Sentiment analysis is useful for monitoring impact when there's a change in the business.

• Switched suppliers - is opinion changing on food?

• Had a refurb? Track what customers are saying about the atmosphere.

• New wine list - are customers responding to it positively?

Keep your finger on the pulse and track how the environment and market conditions are changing around you.

• For example, what do people think of your pricing? See whether the cost-of-living crisis is affecting what customers view as affordable.

• Are the discounts and promotions you're running having an effect on whether your brand is being perceived as good value?

HGEM's Sentiment Analysis features in a nutshell

• Sentiment Analysis, powered by machine learning, analyses text from feedback, reviews and audits; finds subjects (or keywords), opinions relating to those subjects, and determines whether they're positive, negative or neutral.

• You can drill down into what matters most to your customers, what they think about particular subjects, and find all the individual comments from feedback, reviews and audits relating to those opinions. You can also see how opinions change in time.

• You can also identify trends and patterns with an easy-to-use visual representation of what customers are saying about your brand.

• Stay on top of your brand reputation with a new metric - Net Sentiment Score. It works similarly to NPS (promoters - detractors), but where NPS is an indication of loyalty, NSS gives you insight into your brand's reputation.

• This cutting-edge analytical tool in our Guest Experience Management platform - The Hub - is included for free with any product.

Would you like a demo?

Sentiment analysis is a powerful analytical tool that can help you understand your customers better.

We'd welcome the opportunity to discuss how our solutions could help you achieve your business goals. Please get in touch with our friendly team here to arrange a demo.