Sentiment analysis can reveal hidden and often surprising insights into the true nature of the conversation. For example, passing the recent US Presidential address through a sentiment analysis engine, it emerged that this was historically the “angriest” ever and in sharp contrast to Joe Biden’s predecessors.
In a contact centre setting, sentiment analysis applied in real-time and on pre-recorded calls can highlight useful signals and long-term trends in the customer experience.
What is Sentiment Analysis in a Contact Centre?
Sentiment analysis can be defined as a type of artificial intelligence-powered data analysis process that converts a spoken conversation into a textual format to evaluate it against various parameters of emotional response pre-programmed into the system.
Simply put, sentiment analysis tells you the emotional connotations underlying a customer conversation. When assessing a single, one-off interaction, this might not seem so useful – after all, a supervisor can manually listen in and adjudge if the customer is angry, happy, confused, curious, or excited. But when handling volume interactions, sentiment analysis technology lets you achieve in a few minutes or hours the results it would take a human supervisor several days to reach.
How Does Sentiment Analysis Work?
Sentiment analysis is powered by the following component technologies:
- Voice to text conversion that transforms a telephonic interaction into a text string; chat and email conversations remain as is
- A centralised storage system to create a repository of conversations for analysis, consolidating different telephonic lines and interaction channels
- Natural language processing to convert text into a machine-understandable format; this includes understanding context, words that imply a similar emotion, etc
- The core analysis engine that applies a statistical model and sophisticated algorithms to gauge the probability of specific words and phrases indicating a certain emotion, based on their frequency, contextual positioning, and other variables
- A data visualisation dashboard that displays the insights unearthed in a human-understandable format
- An automated alert mechanism that sends notifications or emails whenever a specific sentiment threshold is approached or breached
The above six technologies work together to carry out end-to-end sentiment analysis for a conversation.
