Ever hear the saying “the customer is always right”? Businesses recognize the importance of customer opinion and the impact it has on the sales of their goods and services.
The number of customers leaving reviews online has increased and, according to a report by BIA/Kelsey and ConStat, 97% of people read reviews before they place an order or make a purchase. Brands, therefore, strive to satisfy the needs of customers to ensure loyalty and build a layer of trust with them. Because of this, companies are continuously looking for insight into customers’ thoughts to satisfy them as well as to know how they could leverage this insight in making suggestions on services they might require. Businesses thereby need necessary information to observe experiences customers have with the brand to gauge and predict what they require.
In this era of artificial intelligence (AI), companies no longer need to make use of traditional methods such as customer surveys, questionnaires, focus groups, and interviews to develop an understanding of the minds of their customers as those methods are quite slow and expensive to implement and requires an army of analysts to make use of collected information. Instead, they make use of online reviews as data gathered from them are easily utilized through AI algorithms to ensure that customer sentiments can be predicted in real-time.
Due to the significance of AI in predicting consumer behavior, this article deals with the significance of its application to online reviews and making recommendations.
Sentiment Analysis
Businesses are continuously interested in knowing what their customers think and going through reviews one at a time is a very tedious process. However with the use of AI customers’ attitudes can be easily detected from their reviews and businesses can know immediately if these reviews are good, bad, or neutral.
From recent statistics, 94% of customers mentioned that online reviews gave them a reason to avoid some businesses and 63.6% said they would Google reviews before visiting a business. The opinion of other customers influences that of potential customers. Through analysis of the tone and context in reviews, companies would know what to improve and what services to provide to appease their customers and keep them coming back for more.
Revuzeis a tech start-up that uses artificial intelligence to analyze customer opinions from multiple sources such as social media, e-mails, online reviews, surveys, data collected by call centers, and many others, both online and offline. It carries out its analysis by monitoring keywords thereby deciphering the context in which it is being used to estimate user’s sentiments and to enable the voice of customers to be heard through their review.
The information provided is used to identify trends and topics from gathered user data giving businesses information about their consumer’s opinions of their products in real-time compared to traditional methods where it takes much longer to gather information needed and process it.
According to the CEO, Ido Ramati, Revuze makes use of any amount of unstructured data from any industry such as automobiles, fast food or hotels. Artificial intelligence, neural networks, and machine learning are then used compared to traditional methods of hiring data scientists and product experts to manually predefine and construct certain rules.
Attribute-Based Recommendations
Although data privacy has been an issue of concern for a while, recent studies show that customers are willing to trade their data for more personalized shopping experiences.
#big-data #data-privacy #customer-sentiments #online-reviews #ai #data analysis