December 11, 2023
by Nahla Davies / December 11, 2023
As the customer experience becomes more digital, consumer feedback represents the cornerstone for business improvements.
Yet, as data increases, its interpretation becomes more complex. So how do you simplify work for you and your team? If you haven’t already, now may be the time to use AI for its revolutionary approach to analyzing customer feedback.
This article will introduce you to the transformative power of AI and explore its methods for feedback analysis, the depth of insights it brings, and the ethical considerations it demands.
Let’s take a closer look at how AI can crunch data in numbers we never dreamt of before.
Before the digital age, businesses collected customer feedback manually.
Customers received paper surveys at the end of a shopping experience to share their thoughts and ideas for improvement. They were sometimes invited to participate in focus groups aimed at developing new products or services.
Today’s customers provide feedback through a number of methods, including social media streams, online reviews, or in-app rating systems. But before the rise of digital technology across every industry, businesses had to face complex manual modes of data collection.
Customers offered criticism via surveys carefully designed to give helpful insights to business owners. Although outdated and ineffective nowadays, companies used to rely on focus groups to hear potential customers share their opinions about products and services in development.
Likewise, customer support interactions would sometimes end with a phone questionnaire or email, allowing customers the space to rank their interactions on a numerical scale and offer qualitative feedback as well.
Traditional forms of customer feedback collection presented businesses with several challenges.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has an incredible impact on customer feedback analysis across the board, especially when you think about the astounding amount of information it processes in such a short period of time.
With that in mind, let’s look at AI’s many benefits.
AI tools provide sophisticated feedback interpretations in real time. This makes it easier for businesses to respond almost immediately to customers’ needs while staying on top of data flowing in through other feedback sources.
For instance, when a new review is submitted, AI models can analyze it the second it goes live, gauging the intentions and any additional clues from the message. Compared to a customer service rep who has to read and draw conclusions manually, this is much more efficient.
In addition, AI performs sentiment analyses from an objective perspective, which offers business owners invaluable insight into why customers are satisfied or not.
Sentiment analysis-specialized models reveal the motivations fueling particular types of customer feedback, and this detailed analysis can actually draw a general map of how to better your business. So instead of manually scanning a month’s worth of interactions, a well-trained AI model just takes a quick glance and gives you a useful rundown.
Another reason business owners use AI for feedback analysis is its sophisticated pattern analysis capabilities. Whereas human employees may see and be able to identify the peak of an emerging trend across the market, AI software can scan through monumental data sets and immediately identify patterns.
Based on algorithms programmed to recognize specific keywords and subjects from across all customer input sources, AI-based software can then make highly accurate predictions and immediately devise a plan to capitalize on imminent changes.
This gives your business a focused pathway to make any necessary adjustments so you remain competitive with the coming evolution across your industry.
Companies that have embraced AI-powered feedback analysis have already seen the results of the advanced methods.
Here, we discuss a few specific case studies that reveal the real-world potential of AI in customer feedback analysis.
Did you know that over 80% of all content watched on Netflix is recommended using an AI-powered system?
It observes your viewing habits, ratings, and favorites list, all with the goal of providing you with the most relevant recommendations.
Netflix also relies on machine learning (ML) but with the added goal of shaping developing projects and responding to customer preferences and criticism.
Upon receiving feedback, Netflix uses ML algorithms to understand which characteristics make TV and movie content more successful and satisfying to customers. This gives Netflix a competitive edge in the field of video streaming when it comes to innovation, content development, and experimental methods.
Unsurprisingly, Amazon also uses ML.
They seek to understand the nuanced, sentimental meaning behind each instance of feedback. With every review, comment, or support query, the company’s database gets better at recommending the right products and setting up a starting point for the development of new products.
Despite their market-leading position, Amazon still continues to push boundaries. Their latest innovation involves offering buyers AI-generated product summaries. Of course, this level of generative content is still no substitute for human reviews and assessments.
AI comes with its own set of ethical challenges.
For the most part, it’s because legislators have barely caught up to advancements in the field, resulting in a Wild West situation, with the following challenges causing the most conflict.
The cornerstone of customer trust is ensuring their sensitive data is safe. This is particularly critical when dealing with personal details such as financial and health information.
To address this, businesses must:
AI tools, even simple ones like ChatGPT and image generators, can inadvertently carry biases, which affect their function and output. This issue often originates from the data used to train these AI models or the subjective perspectives of their creators.
For instance, facial recognition software has shown a higher accuracy rate for white male subjects over the age of 30 while frequently misidentifying people of color. It raises concerns, especially in areas like criminal justice, where misidentification leads to severe, erroneous consequences.
Prejudices like these skew customer feedback analysis and lead to flawed product development and customer experience strategies, potentially alienating certain demographics.
Contrary to what you might read in pop-sci publications, the AI we have at our disposal today isn’t actually intelligent, per se. Instead, it’s been training on billions, if not trillions, of parameters, resulting in its excellence in understanding that data contextually.
So when you ask ChatGPT something, it isn’t thinking – it only predicts the most likely answer based on its training data. There’s no rationalization involved.
As impressive as this is, it reinforces the somewhat scary notion that AI is only as good as the data it's been trained on. Imagine if hackers managed to compromise the training of an enterprise-grade AI, and “spiked” it with hateful rhetoric and violent intent. Controls have been tight so far, but it’s still a possibility.
As you embrace the transformative potential of AI, remember to emphasize transparency with your customers.
You should be able to explain the rationale behind all decisions to adopt AI or update AI in any aspect of your operations. For instance, if you’re setting up a particular platform, reassure your audience that AI will only help make your employees’ lives easier, and not just outright replace them.
If your company begins to collect data that reveals how customers view your brand, and you use AI tools to conduct this ongoing research, make sure to alert your customers about it.
Since it’s a still developing field, customers may be suspicious of brands who have tricked them into unwittingly providing data for AI bots to analyze. Visibility surrounding your decisions about AI shows your brand is trustworthy, authentic, and deserving of your base’s time and money.
Instead of being shady, seize the opportunity to stand out. Be upfront with your customers and develop an ongoing conversation over the benefits and drawbacks of AI use in your company. Educate them, and they’ll reward you with positive feedback.
AI technology continues to evolve, becoming ever more essential to interpreting customer feedback and subsequent decision-making.
AI solutions for automating routine tasks create more time for human teams to strategize and develop new projects creatively. Tedious work can now be fully automated, either through specialized solutions or general large language models (LLMs) such as GPT, Claude, or Bard.
Customer support is one such “victim” of automation, but AI isn’t nearly capable enough of fully handling the wide array of tasks a professional juggles daily. Even though some experts believe AI could replace up to 80% of jobs eventually, it can’t be trained to understand the nuances of customer feedback like a human.
Speaking of training, we might one day be able to train sales and support professionals in virtual (VR) or augmented reality (AR). Customers will benefit, too, as they would be able to choose to speak to an avatar in a fantasy world instead of a tired agent who’s counting their last minutes before clocking out.
“Speculative tools” is just a slightly fancier term for “software we wished existed, but won’t for another decade.” This niche is perhaps the most intriguing for the entire AI boom, as it holds huge transformative potential.
Visualizing feedback is another realm that holds huge transformative potential through AI developments.
Feedback visualization tools that use AI can easily sort through vast, jumbled data sets and organize them into clearly accessible categories according to helpful subjects, keywords, topics, and themes relevant to different analysis questions.
In the workspace of tomorrow, AI software might be able to directly source feedback to an integrated document viewer for the whole team to assess. Then, after everyone confirms they’re pleased with the results, they can generate client reports, analyses, and retrospectives in a matter of seconds. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg compared to neural and quantum possibilities of AI tools for customer feedback analysis.
Neural networks are a new concept in data analysis that mimics the complex arrangement of information in our brains. They involve an interconnected network of points that use ML to understand the ideal structures within your data.
After assessing past data, neural networks can predict the likely patterns and outcomes of incoming data sets.
In the realm of customer feedback analysis, this means accurately meeting customer needs and predicting feedback before your audience tells you. Many consider this the final step of automation in the field of customer relationship management (CRM).
The impact of generative AI tools in customer feedback doesn’t stop at efficient analyses or higher scalability. Today’s devs and engineers are already looking into the potential of quantum computing to supercharge AI feedback platforms.
At its current stage of development, it’s still unclear just how far quantum computing will be able to push the field of data analysis. It may be able to solve problems that are currently unsolvable for today’s computers, such as optimization, strategy modeling, predictive analytics, and even scalable customization. Imagine everything, but infinitely faster.
Going forward, businesses across every industry will eventually call on the transformative power of AI for customer feedback analysis. AI tools increase speed and efficiency, enhance data analysis capabilities, and use pattern recognition to predict solutions to consumer issues.
The effects it could have by simply decreasing manual effort and saving money when it comes to the most tedious tasks are appealing. And this is without getting started about the notion of singularity, quantum-powered AI, or anything else that might belong in an episode of Star Trek.
AI’s sentimental analysis reveals the underlying motivations and emotional reactions at play in customer feedback. Machine learning tools easily sort through vast quantities of data, organizing them into helpful categories determined by pre-set factors.
Businesses can use AI for everything from real-time responses to customer feedback, to advanced data visualizations that make it easy for team members to synthesize and strategize with information gleaned from customer feedback responses. AI allows for enhanced communication and collaboration among remote employees, who can stay up to date on the latest customer feedback and company improvements.
The possibilities AI has to enhance customer feedback analyses are just the beginning. Businesses will continue working together with AI developers and engineers to explore the limitless possibilities ahead.
As AI weaves itself into business operations, companies must address the potential challenges now and in the future.
Data privacy will have to be of paramount importance for businesses. Ensuring that customer details are secured will maintain trust with your audience. Likewise, watching out for biases in AI responses and recognizing gender and racial prejudices from data analyses will be an ongoing challenge.
Ethical responsibility, transparency, and equitable relationships with all customers will drive the possibilities AI presents. To harness its power to elevate your business, make sure you know how to remain attuned to your customer’s voices and commit to building a relationship rooted in trust.
Ready to delve deeper into feedback excellence? Explore the significance of a feedback forum in elevating your company's success.
Nahla Davies is a software developer and tech writer. Before devoting her work full time to technical writing, she managed – among other intriguing things – to serve as a lead programmer at an Inc. 5,000 experiential branding organization whose clients include Samsung, Time Warner, Netflix, and Sony.
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