There’s more to evaluating success than monitoring your bottom line. While analyzing your support system on a macro level helps to ensure your costs are going down and earnings are rising, taking a micro approach to your business gives you a thorough appreciation of your business’ performance. Sentiment analysis helps you to clearly see whether your business practices are leading to higher customer satisfaction, or if you’re on the verge of running clients away.

Not all support measures pay off in the long run. Unfortunately, analyzing them for effectiveness takes more than a look at the ledger book. Profits and expenses have a way of missing the bigger picture, so it makes sense to invest in methods you can use to keep track of your company’s reputation.

Sentiment Analysis, defined

Simply put, sentiment analysis is a way of determining people’s opinions based on what they write. Computer programs assess written statements having to do with your company, and determine whether the authors like you or not. Obviously, depending on the program used, your results will be more or less accurate.

In addition, you need to have easy access to many forms of communication related to your company.

Zapier

Web application automation hub Zapier is an excellent example of a service that is easy to use, efficient at delivering multiple types of entries involving support and is affordable for most businesses, regardless of size. With it, you can tap into over 150 web applications used for mixing and matching web-based programs to seamlessly run your company online. Now, you can take advantage of sentiment analysis through a Zapier-friendly, highly-accurate API called Semantria.

With the help of this relatively new API, you can analyze any text that relates to your company’s support system (such as Zendesk or Desk.com, etc.). Twitter posts, for example, can help you gauge whether people are tweeting about your company and programs in a good or bad way. Chat room logs, help desk tickets and the like can provide a tremendous amount of feedback on your business.

Once analyzed, the results can be delivered back to you in a number of ways. Google Docs is a popular option because it’s easily integrated with so many programs, and because it’s free. Both Zapier and Semantria are affordable too. Free trials and a variety of payment options allow businesses big and small to get a taste of sentiment analysis without spending a bundle. You can also use these affordable options to analyze the effectiveness of your support system changes.


Want to get up to speed quickly on conducting your own Sentiment Analysis?