Unconventional Uses for Analytics and Power BI: Text Analytics and Sentiment Analysis

One amazing thing about the 21st century is the fact that there is trackable data in everything we do. However, most businesses don’t know what to do with their data or how it can be manipulated to gain insights on areas outside the normal sales and financial reports. There are many ways you can use analytics to drive better business decisions. One of those ways is to leverage Power BI text analytics and sentiment analysis.

What is Power BI Text Analytics?

Text analytics is the process of finding meaning through written communication. In business terms, this is mostly related to customer experience. Written customer communication can come in a variety of formats, such as customer reviews, social media comments, survey results, and much more.

In the past, companies had to read each communication/response and make insights based on what they read. This was very time-consuming and used many resources. Now, using text analytics software, you can gain insights into thousands of reviews in a matter of seconds without having to read a single entry.

Power BI — which refers to business intelligence — is a data visualization program designed for exactly this task. It can collect and interpret data at an enterprise scale to make sense of many types of data points in a centralized, user-friendly and secure platform. Power BI text analysis can significantly improve a company’s understanding of what its customers are saying, how the business can better meet its clients’ needs and the best strategy to target new audiences.

This program works through Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Dynamics 365 in seamless connection with your workflow. Power BI text mining all comes in a flexible, subscription-based model for easy budgeting and scalability.

Why is Text Analytics Important?

Customer satisfaction and the customer experience are crucial aspects of every business. Therefore, it is important to listen to and understand customer feedback. This feedback will help you understand trends in your business and help you gain insights into what your customers are saying about your industry and your competitors.

Manually collecting and analyzing data can be extremely time-consuming and inaccurate due to subjectivity. Text analytics in Power BI helps to eliminate these issues by streamlining this process through the automation of data collection and analysis. You can obtain this data in a matter of seconds, allowing you to gain insights into your customer satisfaction in real-time.

Performing a Sentiment Analysis

There are a wide variety of ways to apply text analytics to your business. However, performing a sentiment analysis in Power BI is one that is extremely useful when evaluating customer reviews. A sentiment score evaluates each review based on specific language used, which allows you to analyze and interpret large amounts of text. The most common way to perform Power BI sentiment analysis is to score by polarity, or to rank each comment by its positivity or negativity. This will enable you to get an overall average polarity score of your responses.

Emotion-based Sentiment Analysis

If you want to gain an in-depth understanding of how your customers feel, you can use emotion-based sentiment scores. Emotion-based sentiment evaluates each response with emotions such as joy, disgust, fear, anger, trust, sadness, anticipation and surprise. This score can be beneficial not only to understand how your customers feel but also to see if certain products or advertisements invoke a specific emotional response

Aspect-based Sentiment

After you understand how your customers feel about your product, it is important to understand why they feel the way they do. Aspect-based sentiment gives you more detail about customer responses by extracting commonly used words, allowing you to understand the main topics discussed in reviews. This is particularly useful in today’s customer-centric world because it allows you, as a business, to read between the lines of your customer reviews and to gain a better understanding.

Give it a Try

To demonstrate the functionality of text analytics and the different types of sentiment, I have linked a Power BI report to this post.  In this report, you can see how each of the types of sentiment can help Aces, an imaginary card game app, understand what their customers are saying about their product. Feel free to interact with the report by using slicers and clicking on different visuals. You’ll be surprised how easy it is to gain insights using these features within Power BI.

By using these text analytic features, you create a seamless customer experience as well as increase your overall customer retention. For help with your analytics or for more information on Power BI, contact our business intelligence specialists.

Velosio and Text Analysis With Power BI

If better customer relations and text analysis sound like the tools you need in your operation, the experts at Velosio can help. We can bring Power BI text analysis to your business with fast implementation and custom configurations unique to your company’s requirements. All of this comes with expert service and support from our experienced team. Get started on implementing Power BI text mining and analysis with the help of Velosio’s quick, custom and affordable services.

To learn more about working with Velosio and bringing Power BI to your operations, read up on our services or reach out to a pro today!