At the bottom of Dashboard > Reporting > Analytics, you’ll find the Sentiment Analysis and Word Cloud section. It will look something like this:
At first glance, it might be difficult to understand what you’re looking at. So let’s break it down.
The slider at the top of the section represents the star rating threshold for defining “good” sentiments – on the right, in green – and “bad” sentiments, on the left in red. For example, when the slider is in its default center position, the “good” sentiments are taken from reviews with a rating higher than 2.5 stars. The “bad” sentiments are taken from reviews with ratings lower than 2.5 stars.
The word cloud that appears displays the most common words from the reviews that meet those respective ratings criteria. The larger the word, the more frequently it appears in reviews in the same ratings group.
Moving the slider to the right means that reviews with higher ratings will be considered “bad”, and only reviews with the highest ratings will be considered “good”. Moving the slider to the right is asking “what did the customers who loved us, love about us?”
In the above example, we could make a few assumptions about what our happiest customers enjoyed:
- They thought the pizza was good or great
- They had high opinions of the service and staff
- They enjoyed the ambiance of the place
Similarly, moving the slider further to the left can tell us what made our unhappiest customers unhappy.
In the above example, it’s clear that the most common complaint among the unhappiest customers was the wine. It might be time to revise that wine list, folks!
All said, the Sentiment Analysis and Word Cloud tool provides valuable insight into what your customers like and dislike about your business.