Why Sentiment Analysis is a Must-Have for Customer Support Teams in 2023

Sentiment analysis is a critical tool for customer support teams, especially in this time of burgeoning AI accessibility. Sentiment analysis helps companies understand the emotions behind customer inquiries, which in turn enables them to better prioritize support requests and provide top-of-the-line customer service. In this blog post, we’re going to dig into why sentiment analysis isn’t just a nice-to-have for customer support teams - it’s a must-have.

Improved response time

Sentiment analysis enables customer support teams to prioritize requests based on the perceived urgency and sentiment of each inquiry, without a human needing to review it. For example, if a customer is expressing frustration or anger, their request may need to be addressed immediately, while a neutral request can be handled at a later date or time. By prioritizing requests based on sentiment, companies can identify pressing issues instantaneously, thus improving their response time by a significant degree. Nobody wants an important ticket to go unnoticed, most of all the customer support team in question, but a human being simply cannot look at every ticket the moment it lands in Zendesk. AI tools can.

One way to think of using sentiment analysis to prioritize tickets is that you’re getting as close as possible to proactively setting priority on tickets, but without the need to force a clunky form on your customers (anyone who’s worked in support knows that letting customers set the priority of their own tickets is a barrel of monkeys - but that’s a discussion for another blog post all-together).

Enhanced customer satisfaction

Can you think of anything more important than what your customers think about your product or service? Sentiment analysis helps companies understand how their customers feel about their products or services, from which a human can deduce the why. By analyzing not only direct feedback, but every message in a support interaction, companies can identify areas for product or service improvement, address customer concerns that are maybe difficult for customers themselves to articulate, and enhance the overall customer experience. This can lead to increased customer loyalty and ultimately, drive business growth.

If you had a view of all your tickets across all time, what sort of patterns could be uncovered? Where do people fall head-over-heels in love with your product or service, and where do they fall out of your funnel? What do people really think about your product or service? If you’ve been dreaming of a 100% NPS survey response rate (I mean, who doesn’t dream about NPS survey response rates?), well then I’ve got great news for you. Stylo can calculate NPS for every single customer with 100% completion rate, no survey required.

More effective resource allocation

Sentiment analysis can also help customer support teams allocate their resources more effectively. By prioritizing requests based on sentiment, companies can ensure that their most valuable customers receive the attention they need, when they need it. This can greatly reduce response times, ultimately leading to better customer service. If you've got high-touch customers, you know just how important a fast and effective response it.

In conclusion

Sentiment analysis tools are of the utmost importance to customer support teams, so that they can triage and prioritize as efficiently and effectively as possible. It enables companies to quickly prioritize requests, enhance customer satisfaction, allocate resources more effectively, and understand their customers such that the overall customer experience can be improved.