How an Ecommerce-Insights Company Uses AI to Understand Customer Sentiment

November 3, 2020 3 min read

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Boaz Grinvald is the CEO at Revuze, a firm that helps businesses win their markets by mining unique insights from unstructured market opinions, both public and internal. Revuze performs sentiment analysis by personalizing the automated process to maximize accuracy and its success rate. 

Also known as opinion mining or emotion AI, sentiment analysis helps a business understand the social sentiment of their brand, product or service by mining text that identifies and pulls subjective information from the source material. An automated process, algorithms classify statements as positive, negative and neutral through machine learning and text analytics. 

Revuze emphasizes personalization as the key to learning consumer sentiment regarding certain product features. With their AI algorithms, the big-data consumer-analytics firm can extract unique topics ranging in specificity from the general, including price, to the specific, such as softness. 

Related: The Growth of Artificial Intelligence in Ecommerce (Infographic)

I recently spoke with Grinvald to discuss how brands can gain a unique insight into the minds of consumers by way of sentiment analysis.

Why is sentiment analysis critical in the consumer journey?

Sentiment analysis allows brands to understand where consumers stand on a wide range of things: brand, service, product or even a feature of a product or service.

As an example, an online review such as, “So happy with my new iPhone, the screen is amazing and the camera is just unbelievable. It was a bit pricy though” can help a brand such as Apple learn that sentiment is very positive towards the recent iPhone screen and camera, but that the sentiment towards the price is negative. 

How did Covid-19 change consumer behavior?

Consumer behavior changed during the pandemic in several ways. The main changes in behavior involve health concerns that push consumers to rely more on online commerce versus retail. Consumers also lower their loyalty towards brands based on online availability, as well as on financial concerns. 

Also, working from home pushed consumers to invest more in their home and home office. As an example, sentiment towards earphones with noise cancellation grew due to the need to work from home, while price sensitivity sentiment declined as consumers were willing to pay more for items needed for their work. 

What advice do you have for the CEOs out there who are about to operate in ecommerce marketplaces? 

Listen, listen and listen. It’s all out there — billions of online reviews with details and sentiment at the product and feature level, ripe to be taken. You will be a fly on the wall in the largest consumer panel and will be able to know the sentiment about your offerings, as well as about those of your competitors. All you need to do is tap into the right, detailed business communication channel, which is the ecommerce reviews.

Related: Here’s How Customer Experience And AI Are Driving The Next Gen Of Ecommerce Industry

What do you think the ecommerce market will look like in several years?

Ecommerce favors new brands and innovators with a low barrier of entry, and now that the crowds are buying more and more online, I believe in a few years we will see lots of new brands rising quickly online. These new brands will likely be digitally savvy and will leverage the consumer sentiment feedback to grow quickly and with fewer mistakes, which is why I anticipate lots of new brands and products popping up that will become household names.