Helping Retailers Stay Ahead By Gauging Sentiment
By Guy Yehiav, Profitect
Online brand and product reviews today are an important part of the retailer-shopper relationship. As more consumers take to the Internet and social media to share their retail experiences and feedback, retailers must be keenly aware of how reviews impact brand reputation, risk and even their bottom line. Given this impact, reviews serve as an interesting and informative data point that can help retailers improve the shopper relationship, and ultimately sales. But the question remains, how can brands leverage this information?
The answer lies with prescriptive analytics, which provide retailers with a quick, effective way to read and interpret the data or reviews they are collecting. Powered by machine learning and AI, prescriptive analytics can identify areas where things are already working well or where the retailer can improve operational efficiency. When it comes to reading and interpreting reviews is where sentiment analysis comes into play. Sentiment analysis combs through textual data, like reviews and comments, isolating buzzwords and key themes that retailers value. This could be anything from customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction to pricing, service, cleanliness and product quality.
While there are other solutions that can address this problem for retailers, few of them can accurately capture true intent the way sentiment analysis does. Understanding intent is critical to understanding the true meaning behind a comment and getting accurate insights.
For example, consider these two fictional comments about a handbag:
- “I bought this cheap purse.”
- “I bought this purse cheap.”
Notice that despite having the exact same words, the order in which the words appear changes the meaning. #1 has a negative intent, while #2 is more positive, highlighting a great deal. Having an effective way to manage and understand reviews and their meaning helps retailers collect accurate insights into consumers’ shopping experiences or product issues.
A second benefit of leveraging a sentiment analysis solution is that it provides an effective and efficient way for retailers to act on this type of data. Instead of compiling all of the data from reviews into mind-numbing spreadsheets (which often take hours to digest) — or even worse, scouring online reviews every morning — prescriptive analytics provide store associates or brand owners with prescribed actions that are based on the data sets collected.
For a real-world client example, a retailer introduced a new line of warmer-weather clothes last fall in anticipation of a cold, dreary winter season. After a few days, there was a significant uptick in negative reviews around one of the jackets in the new line. Consumers were complaining about how the material was not holding up well after washing and drying, and were showcasing why other consumers should not buy the product. The prescriptive action from sentiment across all of the reviews brought this detail to the retailer’s attention quickly, highlighting that the jacket material needed to be re-evaluated. This insight allowed the retailer to react quickly and add a “Dry Clean Only” tag to the remaining product, which solved the issue and saved sales for that particular jacket.
Prescriptive analytics and sentiment analysis solutions are not only helping retailers save time by combing through massive amounts of data and reviews, but also by highlighting only the reviews that truly need addressing: price, cleanliness, satisfaction or profiling. When you combine all the information you need — the unstructured data, the scores and intents assigned to it by sentiment analysis, and the corresponding KPIs (i.e. sales reports, return rates, merchandise quality, damages, etc.) — you have everything you need in order to drive operational efficiency and improve the customer experience.
As CEO of Profitect, Guy Yehiav is responsible for overseeing the overall corporate strategy and direction for the company. A 25+ year retail supply chain industry veteran, Yehiav has guided the company through multiple concurrent years of significant double-digit growth. Prior to Profitect, Yehiav served as Vice President Sales & Strategy for Oracle’s Value Chain Planning Solutions, where he was responsible for sales, strategy and customer success. He also was founder of Demantra US, a leading global provider of demand-driven planning solutions, which was acquired by Oracle in 2006. Previously, he directed the Global Professional Service Group, where he was in charge of creating methodologies and infrastructure through value chain transformations that enabled demand driven and seamless operations for Fortune 1000 companies.