All businesses want to improve their products and services. If you’re not improving, you’re not going to stay relevant.
When it comes to understanding where improvements need to happen, customer feedback is an unrivaled goldmine. It’s a window into customer satisfaction, preferences, and pain points—unbiased and unfiltered. But the sheer volume of feedback companies receive today, across multiple channels like surveys, reviews, support tickets, and social media, is overwhelming.
Product managers and customer support leaders are frequently tasked with sifting through this data to extract actionable insights. Yet, doing so manually is labor and time-intensive—not to mention, prone to error.
Enter, AI text analysis. Customer intelligence platforms, like Unwrap, can process vast amounts of unstructured data quickly and accurately, helping teams understand customer feedback at scale.
If you’re someone who’s staring at a messy excel sheet, trying to figure out how in the world you’re going to process thousands of customer feedback responses and confidently find patterns worth addressing, keep reading. The solution you’ve been looking for is below.
A brief background on AI text analysis
AI text analysis uses a technology known as natural language processing (NLP) and involves using machine learning models to extract meaningful information from unstructured data. Unlike structured data (think numbers or categorical labels in databases), unstructured data refers to text in surveys, reviews, phone calls, support tickets, or social media posts—which cannot be analyzed easily at scale.
By analyzing text, artificial intelligence can identify themes, sentiments, and intentions expressed in customer feedback. The goal of AI text analysis is to reduce the cognitive load on people while increasing the accuracy and granularity of insight generation from large amounts of text-based data.
Large language models (LLMs) with generative AI can assist users by creating summaries, tagging and categorizing feedback with relevant labels, and surfacing new trends as they appear. These capabilities allow organizations to automate aspects of customer feedback analysis and get richer, more nuanced insights faster.
Types of AI text analysis that play a role in processing customer feedback
Here are three impactful types of AI text analysis as they relate to customer feedback: topic analysis and categorization, sentiment analysis, and intent discovery. Read on to see what each type does and how a NLP platform can make use of it.
1. Topic analysis and classification: identifying top themes in feedback and organizing it for better decision-making
- What it is: Topic analysis helps businesses identify recurring themes or topics in customer feedback. Classification involves grouping those themes into accurate categories. For example, a customer support manager may want to know what aspects of a product customers talk about the most—ease of use, pricing, customer support, or a specific feature.
- How NLP technology is useful: The best NLP platforms with generative AI can automatically categorize feedback into distinct topics without requiring predefined rules or categories They can also recognize emerging topics, providing real-time insights into new product features customers are discussing or pain points that are increasingly mentioned.
This saves product managers from having to manually tag thousands of customer feedback entries—instead providing immediate clarity on which topics demand attention. This, in turn, allows them to make data-driven decisions and allocate resources more effectively.
The ability of AI-powered platforms to analyze feedback in multiple languages further expands its usefulness for global businesses.
2. Sentiment analysis: understanding customer emotions
- What it is: Sentiment analysis picks up the emotional tone behind a piece of text and categorizes it as positive, negative, or neutral. For product managers, this helps gauge customer satisfaction and monitor how changes to the product affect user sentiment over time.
- How NLP technology is useful: NLP platforms can automatically interpret and assign sentiment to customer feedback in real-time. Beyond just labeling feedback as positive or negative, advanced models can capture and summarize more nuanced emotions like frustration, enthusiasm, confusion, or dissatisfaction.
With sentiment analysis, support and product teams can at a glance prioritize which issues need immediate attention. For example, if sentiment analysis helps show a spike in negative feedback after a new product update, a product manager can quickly identify the problematic feature and work with the development team to fix it.
3. Issue summarization: recognizing what customers want
- What is it: Issue summarization focuses on identifying the purpose behind a customer’s message and summing up their overall intent into a succinct recap. This allows teams to quickly review interactions without tediously reading an entire chat exchange and or phone call transcript.
- How NLP technology is useful: NLP models can process conversations that happen online, over the phone, or any cloud-based video conferencing service and provide an overview of the most important points of the conversation. They can determine if a customer’s interaction is asking for assistance, requesting a refund, suggesting a feature, or expressing dissatisfaction with a product—and categorize those messages accordingly. This automation enables businesses to respond more efficiently to feedback by routing messages to the appropriate teams or initiating specific actions.
For product managers, understanding customer interactions can help prioritize product updates. For instance, if an issue summary reveals that a significant portion of feedback includes requests for a specific feature, that information can be used to prioritize future roadmaps.
How AI text analysis eases workloads across an organization
Product managers and customer success and support managers often face the challenge of translating customer feedback into actionable improvements. AI text analysis simplifies this process in the following ways:
Faster insights with less effort
By automating topic analysis and classification, sentiment analysis, and issue summarization, AI can provide teams with instant insights that would otherwise take days or weeks to gather manually. The result? Quicker decision-making—allowing teams to act on emerging trends or critical issues before they escalate.
Increased accuracy and reduced bias
Analysis of customer feedback conducted by people can often be subjective, with biases affecting how feedback is categorized and interpreted. AI text analysis provides an objective, data-driven approach to combing through feedback, improving the accuracy of insights and ensuring that important issues aren’t missed.
Better prioritization of resources
AI text analysis, and the platforms that provide it, helps CS and PM teams prioritize their focus. By analyzing the frequency, sentiment, and intent behind customer feedback, AI can identify which issues need immediate attention and which are less urgent. This reduces the risk of resource misallocation and helps ensure teams focus on what’s going to move the needle.
Continuous monitoring and real-time alerts
NLP models can continuously monitor incoming feedback, offering real-time insights into customer sentiment, emerging topics, or significant shifts in customer intent. For example, if negative feedback about an existing feature spikes, AI can alert teams to investigate further and address the issue before it impacts customer satisfaction more broadly.
Reduction of costs, regardless of company size
One of the most significant advantages of AI text analysis is its ability to lower operational costs associated with customer feedback analysis. Here’s how:
- Decreased amount of manual labor: Using AI to analyze customer feedback means you can do more with less. Teams can focus on strategic tasks and leave the data processing to the NLP platform.
- Scalability: As a company grows, so does its volume of customer feedback. AI enables businesses to scale their feedback analysis without needing to hire additional staff or invest in complex infrastructure.
- Faster action on feedback: Speed is essential when addressing customer feedback, especially negative feedback. AI-powered platforms provide insights in real-time, enabling businesses to act quickly and reduce the costs associated with customer churn or dissatisfaction.
Don’t let AI text analysis platforms leave you in the dust
AI-powered text analysis is revolutionizing the way teams handle customer feedback. In an era where customer experience can make or break a brand, AI text analysis is a valuable tool that helps companies stay competitive by delivering the insights they need to act decisively and continuously improve their products and services.
Want to see this in action? Read how Zipcar assesses thousands of NPS surveys—automatically.