Competitors
"Sentiment analysis,“ the process of understanding customer emotions, is a $5 billion industry. Scores of companies purport to identify the “voice of the customer” by analyzing texts, blogs, emails, chats, support tickets, online reviews, and social media postings. But a close examination of the industry reveals that these products are complex, disruptive, prone to inaccuracy, expensive, and only marginally beneficial.
Complex
Gartner recently reviewed 19 of the most promising sentiment analysis tools. While all were praised by industry experts, reviewers complained that customization, configuration, onboarding, feature usage, reports, and dashboards were unnecessarily complex. In a recent study of 700 contact center and CX departments, senior decision makers from contact center and CX departments, 68% say that don't use their customer experience data to the best advantage citing difficulty in turning "growing volumes of customer interaction data into meaningful action."
Disruptive
Because today's sentiment analysis tools are complex, they are necessarily disruptive. Software integration, debugging, staff training, and daily maintenance inevitably lead to IT overload, service delays, order mistakes, and unhappy customers.
Prone to error
All sentiment analysis products on the market today use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to determine customer sentiment. The process analyzes blogs, emails, chats, support tickets, text messages, online reviews, social media postings, and phone call translations looking for words and phrases associated with specific emotions. However, NLP only captures a fraction of actual communication, overlooking the sincerity, stress, and hidden intent in the human voice. As a result, results can be incomplete at best and inaccurate at worst.
Expensive
Most “sentiment analysis” products require 12-month contracts forcing long-term commitment without proven benefits. Annual costs range from $12K to over 100K.; but due to probability of unexpected expenses, the total cost may not become known until the final invoice arrives.
Of marginal benefit
The most critical question to ask about any product is: Does it solve an important problem? Today’s sentiment analysis products insist they do. But when you read the fine print, it’s clear that their benefits are fuzzy at worst and restricted to marketing insights at best. Most businesses need more tangible benefits measured in dollars-and-sense.
