How Emotion Analytics Is Powering The Next Generation of Chatbots

The advancement in AI has led to many innovations in chatbots. The recent inclusion of emotion or sentiment analysis is one such example that has significantly changed how the customer communication system is perceived.

Chatbots are commonly used for sales, customer support, and ecommerce marketing. However, their applications are increasing in other segments as well. As per IBM, 40% of businesses in the U.S., EU, and China are using pre-built AI programs. It includes chatbots and virtual agents.

The technology has arguably pushed the abilities of chatbots, powering the next generation chatbots to perform even better.In this article, we will learn about emotion or sentiment analysis and how it is fuelling the abilities of live chat functionality.

What is emotion analysis?

Emotion or sentiment analysis is a functionality that allows chatbots to understand a user’s state of feeling by analysing oral communication and sentence structuring clues. With its help, chatbots can quantify attitudes, opinions, and emotions of consumers towards a business, product or service, or subject. It is a top layer of a chatbot’s natural language understanding (NLU) engine.

In the simplest term, emotion analysis tells you if the customer response is positive or negative. For example, a word that otherwise carries a positive connotation may be used in a sarcastic way. If this happens, it could be misinterpreted easily by an algorithm if both tone and context are not considered at once.

So, an advanced emotion analysis solution uses acoustic measurements. It includes observation of the rate of speech, the tension in a caller’s voice, and changes in stress signals during the conversation.The biggest advantage of emotion analysis is that it doesn’t need a large scale of data to process and tailor a chatbot conversation to respond to the reaction of users. It can work on a small scale.

How does sentiment analysis work?

As a part of business automation, AI chatbots have taken a front seat in handling first-level customer support. So, how do they do this?
Let us break down the working system of sentiment analysis in chatbots to understand its working:

Firstly, it determines emotion types and estimates if the emotion in the conversation is positive, negative, neutral, objective, or a combination of any. The technology clearly identifies emotions like happiness, anger, positivity, disgust, fear, sadness, curiosity, and any other form of emotions.

The technology uses NLP (Natural Language Processing) and AI (Artificial Intelligence) to measure the intensity of the emotions. They also assign a numerical score to each of the identified emotions in the conversation.

In this stage, emotion analysis provides the final analysis to guide the chatbot to carry out the conversation in the right direction. For instance, if the conversation gets a high positive score, i.e., joy + happiness, the chatbots can take it up as an opportunity to recommend products or convert the prospects. Conversely, suppose there is a conversation with a high negative score, i.e., sad + anger. In that case, the digital assistant can escalate the complaint and transfer the call to a live support agent.

How is emotional analysis powering the next generation chatbots?

Emotion analysis in chatbots is building and optimising user experiences significantly. Here is how it improved the experience.

Create the best customer experience: Every user comes with different emotions, and they will not like to be treated the same way as the robots do. Emotion analysis enables the chatbot to adapt in real-time and make data-driven decisions by identifying the type of their mood and selecting the most appropriate response for the user. Therefore, you can deliver the best experience to the user.

Build and monitor brand: Apart from generating a relevant response, emotion analysis also allows you to know how people feel about your business, product, or services at any stage of the customer lifecycle. Using technology, you can communicate effectively and build their trust in your brand. At the same time, you can inspire loyalty in your customers and increase the longevity of their relationship with your brand.

Improve customer support: Chatbots have some limitations in handling certain types of customers, and this is where human agents come into the picture. But how would a chatbot know when to hand over the customer to the human agent? Emotion analysis enables chatbots to sense the tone of the aggrieved customer and auto-transfer the ticket to a human. As the chatbot can automatically handle a majority of customer inquiries 24/7, the human agents have plenty of time to focus on these angry customers.

Do market analysis: Emotion analysis of customer conversation provides unique and powerful consumer insights. It can also be cashed to profit from the overall productivity of your business. You get accurate data, which can be used to determine the effectiveness of products/services. So, you can design future strategies, classify the customer base, and devise powerful brand positioning.

Track customer sentiment: Continually checking customer sentiment will inspire you to improve both your processes and products on a regular basis. At the same time, it will help you understand how well you are performing in the market. Working on customers’ pain points will bring change to their opinions, which you can observe by tracking their sentiment.

Improve plan process: You can consider your customers’ reaction while making strategic decisions. Customers can have positive or negative responses for your business. Moreover, you can refer to the first-party data that chatbots analytics provide. When you generate insightful business strategies from user feedback or the first-hand information, you act appropriately and you can consistently improve the user return rate.

Final Thoughts

When combined with the human brain, emotion analysis-powered-chatbots are stronger together as a support system for any business. Chatbots are evolving at an amazing pace with ever-improving AI technology. This is the reason why they are blending well with increasingly remote working trends and a progressively competitive CX market.

Chatbot with emotional analysis functionality is successfully providing an optimal experience to each individual user. It is offering personalisation and consideration at a greater scale. Moreover, offering real-time service at a consistent rate is priceless in growing your business and retaining your existing relationships. Latest chatbots can be a boon for you and your workforce in achieving your goal, that too, without much financial burden.