As customer measure of experience (C-MeX) scores are published in a league table each quarter, UK water companies should look to emerging technologies like sentiment analysis to help them predict and actively manage customer perception.

They need to move beyond measures like Net Promoter Scores (NPS) to predict C-MeX results. It’s no longer about delivering excellent customer service in the moment; it’s about managing and maintaining a positive brand perception with the domestic households they serve.

In the video interview below, James Robbins, Founder of WinningCIO and former CIO at Northumbria Water, outlines an example whereby waterworks impacting traffic and travel plans in a local area could harm customer perception of a company. Water companies can keep a pulse on perception in real-time and actively mitigate any complaints by utilizing emerging technologies like artificial intelligence.

How sentiment analysis can help C-MeX results 

Sentiment analysis tools automatically identify emotional tone by analyzing written customer feedback to establish whether the manner is positive, negative or neutral. It uses natural language processing (NLP) – a form of machine learning artificial intelligence – to transform human language into a form that machines can understand and interpret.

The machine learning models can be trained, over time, to recognize certain types of sentiment better and thus classify the feedback with increasing accuracy. It can be applied to data en-masse or dynamically in near real-time as customers share feedback via the various channels available.

Consumer data can be analyzed from corporate channels – CRM tools, customer service data repositories, or social media mentions – and combined with publicly available data – like social media feeds, consumer websites and forums or local newsfeeds – to enrich insights.

It will provide water companies with the ever-increasing ‘big picture’ visibility of the ‘voice of the customer’ by applying sentiment analysis techniques across a combined data set and using it to extract new insights such as:

  • Improved understanding of the ‘voice of the customer’
  • Better designed products and services tailored to genuine customer sentiment
  • Keep on the pulse of positive or negative sentiment in the local area
  • Redeploy marketing and communication efforts to mitigate any negative PR actively
  • The ability to predict future C-MeX scores and take proactive steps to improve them as necessary.

Start using sentiment analysis with UiPath AI Center

It seems a mammoth task, but sentiment analysis can be easily deployed with UiPath AI Center. It makes operational artificial intelligence easy to deploy, manage, and continuously improve with machine learning. There is an out of the box language sentiment model that uses text summarization and sentiment analysis to predict outcomes giving UK water companies access to the big picture.

For more information about UiPath AI Center, get in touch.

For further reading on to start using UiPath AI Center, download the It’s Time to Supercharge RPA with Artificial Intelligence webinar.