Keeping It Personal With Natural Language Processing

Consumers are increasingly using conversational AI devices (e.g., Amazon Echo and Google Home) and text-based communication apps (e.g., Facebook Messenger and Slack) to engage with brands and each other. Yet many companies have not figured out how to analyze data from these communication tools to make it easier to interact with customers and create a more positive customer experience. In these days of customer choice, it is the customer experience that can make or break a company.

Today, customers expect their interactions with companies to be simple, intuitive, efficient and actually solve the issue at hand. In some cases, they even want to have fun when ?engaging with their favorite brands. The customer experience is a prominent factor in customer loyalty and longevity with a brand and a direct influence on a company’s net promoter score. People want an immediate response from you whether they’re on your website or phoning your call center. Social media messaging and web chats are becoming more prevalent forms of customer contact, and the nature of those communication streams demands faster, more accurate responses, all while still maintaining that personal touch.

NLP Improves the Customer Experience

But it’s difficult for contact centers to understand and respond to customer requests using manual approaches, which leave staff overwhelmed and customers frustrated with long wait times and inaccurate resolutions. Add a variety of channels for customer feedback and the challenge grows exponentially for businesses. In an era with technology just a voice away, customers are unwilling to tolerate long wait times, engage in complex searches to find basic information or tolerate a bad experience. Another layer of complexity is added for global companies that must also identify regional trends and accurately respond to feedback in a variety of languages and dialects.

Natural language processing (NLP) helps companies make sense of all that noise and really understand what their customers are saying and take appropriate action to give customers the best experience possible. NLP is a branch of artificial intelligence that draws from many disciplines, including computer science and computational linguistics. Its focus is understanding, interpreting and emulating human language.

By using NLP to analyze large volumes of unstructured text data from all your customer channels, you can rapidly examine information to gain meaningful insights and use those insights to provide a better customer experience. Rapid categorization of unstructured text in call center transcripts, social media conversations and web chat information can identify the topics that are meaningful to customers and provide real-time recommendations that provide a quick and accurate response to their needs. Analyzing social media sites can provide insights to public sentiment with topic discovery that can reveal dimensions of interest and how those are changing over time. These insights then allow a company to act objectively and quickly based on the voice of the customer.