Do you know what your guests are saying about your attraction online?
Sentiment analysis is a useful way to detect how consumers feel about a particular company or brand by monitoring what they’re saying about it online.
Imagine how beneficial this can be for a tourism attraction like a museum or waterpark, whose customers are likely sharing videos and photos from their experience on social media.
Sentiment analysis allows attractions to analyze loads of unstructured data — think picture captions, comments, tweets, reviews — without having to sift through it manually.
In this post, you’ll learn how to use sentiment analysis to improve your guest experience.
What are the most common sentiment analysis methods?
When should you use sentiment analysis?
How to conduct sentiment analysis without taking a ton of time
5 examples of how you can use sentiment analysis
- 1. Social media monitoring
- 2. Interpreting customer feedback
- 3. Measure customer loyalty
- 4. Customer service
- 5. Market research
What is sentiment analysis?
Sentiment analysis is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) technique that helps businesses determine whether customer feedback is positive or negative.
It’s an analysis often performed on textual data like social media comments or online reviews, which often describe how customers are feeling about a particular brand or experience.
A sentiment analysis tool can analyze all of these reviews and comments and automatically identify the emotional tone behind them. You’ll then have a better understanding of how your guests truly feel about your brand, how they perceive your reputation, and whether they’re happy with your guest experience.
For example, an aquarium might perform a sentiment analysis on its 10,500 followers on Instagram.
The analysis could focus on how the follower is interacting with the brand online, including what they’re saying about it. The aquarium might find that a large percentage of the comments have positive keywords like “love” or “amazing,” meaning guests are posting about how much they enjoyed their visit.
This can help the aquarium understand what’s making their customers happy, as well as what’s frustrating them. The company can then work to improve its weak points and better tailor its experience to guests’ needs and preferences.
What are the most common sentiment analysis methods?
The most popular sentiment analysis methods will measure how positive or negative your guests feel about your attraction, as well as how they feel (happy or frustrated) about the experience.
These methods can also be used to measure overall interest in your brand as well as the urgency of guest requests:
- Fine-grained sentiment analysis: Measure how positive or negative your guests feel about their visit by asking them to rate their experience from 1 to 5, with 1 meaning “very negative” and 5 meaning “very positive.”
- Emotion detection: Machine learning algorithms are used to detect positive or negative emotions in reviews, comments, and other conversations.
- Aspect-based sentiment analysis: Zero-in on the specific factors of your guest experience (such as long queue times) that are positively or negatively impacting your guests.
When should you use sentiment analysis?
With so many people now sharing about their daily experiences online, sentiment analysis is a handy tool to monitor how your customers are feeling.
It should be used when attractions want to accurately analyze guest feedback, yet don’t have the time or staff to do it manually.
It’s particularly useful for attractions that actively engage with guests via online channels like social media and email. Sentiment analysis can automatically analyze all of this communication and help you determine guest sentiment based on these interactions.
Analyzing this data manually can be costly and take up a lot of time, which is why many attractions might skip it.
With sentiment analysis, though, you’ll have the right tools to better understand how your guests are feeling in real-time.
By analyzing what guests are saying about your company online, you can quickly identify problems that could get out of hand if they’re not addressed. This can help your attraction get ahead of any issues before they impact more guests and hurt your brand image.
How to conduct sentiment analysis without taking a ton of time
Want to quickly find out what your guests are saying about you online? You can start with a manual and free social media analysis.
Use a freemium tool, like Hootsuite, to monitor your social channels for mentions of your brand. Hootsuite allows you to track ”brand mentions” so that any time someone tags or mentions your company on Instagram or Twitter, you’ll be able to see it.
You could also monitor specific hashtags that are related to your attraction or experience.
To go beyond social media monitoring, several sentiment analysis tools can automate this for you. These tools use machine learning to analyze text conversations and evaluate the tone, intent, and emotion behind every text written about your brand.
5 examples of how you can use sentiment analysis
Here are five examples that show how your attraction leverages sentiment analysis to improve your guest experience.
1. Social media monitoring
People typically share their travel experiences online with their friends and family.
One of the main uses of sentiment analysis is to monitor what your guests are saying about you on these platforms. If your guests are active on social media, you could learn a lot from the way they talk about your brand.
If a theme park notices negative comments about its food stalls, for example, it can further investigate what’s going on. It can do quality checks and send a survey to customers specifically asking them about the dining options available at the park.
The theme park might come away with valuable insight into how to improve this part of the guest experience and prevent future complaints about the food.
2. Interpreting customer feedback
Customer feedback can be subjective. While one of your team members might interpret a comment as extremely negative, another one might find it less pressing.
When you’re working with a sentiment analysis tool, however, a computer will be doing the interpretations for you. You’ll be able to teach the program exactly what kind of language to look for and how to categorize it.
Sentiment analysis allows you to find a deeper meaning behind the hundreds of reviews guests have left online.
It can detect sarcasm, read common acronyms, and understand misused words. For example, the review “Still waiting for my refund two months later… awesome!” would be interpreted as negative even though the word “awesome” is typically used in a positive connotation.
It’ll then categorize reviews as positive, neutral, or negative so that you can focus on the feedback that’ll bring you the most insight.
3. Measure customer loyalty
Your Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a metric used to measure guest loyalty.
You can find your NPS through a single-question customer survey asking, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our attraction to a friend or family member?”
This form of sentiment analysis will identify your most loyal customers, also known as the “promoters” of your brand. You can follow up by asking for a more detailed response, such as “In a few sentences, can you explain the reasoning behind your rating?”
You can then further analyze the responses to identify what aspects of your customer experience appeals to your most loyal fans.
4. Customer service
Your customer service plays an important role in the overall guest experience.
Yet when an attraction is inundated with customer queries, staff members might feel strained. This can impact the quality of service they provide to guests.
A chatbot could be a helpful solution. Chatbots can offer automated responses for someone asking for directions to your escape room, for example. Your staff would then be free to assist with more urgent matters like someone requesting a wheelchair for their visit.
Sentiment analysis can be used to automatically organize customer queries by topic and urgency. Customer requests through a chatbot or email would be sent to the right department within your company to ensure they’re dealt with in the most efficient way possible.
Since you’ll be monitoring social media as well, you’ll be better equipped to assist with guest requests on Instagram or Facebook. If a guest leaves a comment on Instagram asking if you’ll be open on Labor Day, for instance, they should receive a timely answer.
5. Market research
How about using sentiment analysis to learn about what your guests are saying about your competitors?
You can not only track how your guests are feeling about your company, but also your competitors. You can specifically examine what aspects they like about your competition — and work to go above and beyond in that area at your attraction.
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The best way to get to know your guests is to listen to them. It’s important for your attraction to hear your guests in-person as well as online.
What are they saying to their friends and families about their visit? You can find out by analyzing guest reviews, comments, messages, and other interactions they’ve had with your company.
It may seem overwhelming to sift through so much customer feedback, but that’s why sentiment analysis automates the process for you.
Your attraction can leverage this technology to ensure you’re always meeting your guest’s expectations.
