Marchex’s Sentiment Analysis Suite for home services offers many benefits that help businesses better understand customer feedback, improve service quality, and enhance customer satisfaction. You might wonder why sentiment analysis is necessary when you already collect reviews and send out surveys. It’s still important because Sentiment Suite can collect customer emotions for your team, provide deeper insights such as how customer emotions fluctuate throughout a call and their overall view of your business. For this reason, it is critical to understand why your customers may be frustrated (technicians are late or rude, for example), whether this is a location or agent problem, and take steps to remedy the issue – and then track that it has improved.
Capture All Customer Emotions
Sentiment analysis provides a deeper understanding of customer emotions and attitudes by analyzing the nuances in their language. It captures the subtleties of positive, negative, and neutral sentiments in real-time conversations. Going further, Sentiment Suite identifies likely reasons why a business’ customers feel the way they do, which can provide a holistic understanding of the customer across all conversations. These deep insights can help businesses pinpoint where to focus their efforts to improve the customer experience. After each call, Sentiment Suite generates a text-based summary of the positive, negative, or neutral sentiment and then describes the likely reasons why the customer expressed the sentiment from an emotional standpoint.
Drawbacks to Surveys
Surveys often rely on structured questions with predefined answer options, which often miss the subtleties of customer emotions and experiences. Written reviews provide a general sense of customer satisfaction but often lack the depth to fully capture the emotional nuances and specific pain points. Reviews can be influenced by individual reviewer biases, leading to a less balanced view of overall customer sentiment.
Both surveys and reviews lack scalability and volume. Sentiment analysis can process large volumes of conversation data automatically, making it scalable and efficient for ongoing sentiment tracking. However, knowing the customer’s emotion is only the first step. Understanding customer perceptions of your business is equally important. Here’s why both aspects are critical and how they complement each other.
Emotion vs. Perception
Emotion: Sentiment analysis captures how customers feel (happy, frustrated, satisfied, etc.) about their interactions with your business.
Perception: Perceptions provide context and detail, explaining why customers may feel a certain way (emotion) and highlighting specific areas for improvement or reinforcement, such as perceptions of poor customer service, lack of follow up, service delays, product quality, unhelpful agent, technician knowledge or professionalism.
For example, a caller was frustrated and annoyed at an HVAC business because despite being promised a refund for a service cancellation, it had not been processed for 11 days. At the beginning of the next call, her Sentiment was labeled as negative, and her emotion as frustrated. However, the tone of the call shifted as the agent patiently listened to the caller’s concerns, checked the account details, confirmed the refund had been issued, and provided reassurance about the refund process. This left the caller feeling satisfied and appreciative of the assistance. As a result, the caller left the conversation satisfied, and their overall View of the Business is positive. The Sentiment Summary noted that as the agent provides information and reassurance about the refund being processed, the tone shifts to relieved and appreciative. The caller ended the conversation on a positive note, thanking the agent and expressing gratitude.
Look at emotion as the VoC or voice of the customer and perception as VoB, view of the business. Understanding both emotion and perception provides a more holistic view of the customer experience, giving you actionable insights that may require urgent attention to prevent potential damage to the reputation of your home service company.
Understand the Full Scope of Customer Sentiment
In conclusion, sentiment analysis provides crucial insights into customer emotions, understanding customer perceptions offers a complete picture of how your business is viewed and experienced. By integrating both, businesses can gain a comprehensive understanding of customer needs, make more informed decisions, and ultimately enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.
With Marchex’s Sentiment Analysis Suite, you can gain insights into both the emotions and perceptions of your customers.
Learn More
For more information about how Sentiment Suite can help your home services business enhance customer understanding, better inform agent training, and increase customer satisfaction, book some time with our team today.
