Glossary

Sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis is the automatic detection of emotion in a conversation: whether the customer is happy, calm, or frustrated. It works from chat text or a call transcript, and sometimes from the voice itself. You see which calls and chats went badly without listening to every recording, and find out what made customers unhappy.

Why it mattersIt helps you spot an unhappy customer in time and fix the problem before it turns into a complaint.

Also called: Sentiment analysis, Emotion analysis, Customer mood detection

How it works

Calls are transcribed first (speech-to-text), while chats are analyzed directly. Then a language model or a simpler classifier rates each phrase and the whole conversation as positive, neutral, or negative. Some systems also factor in the voice: volume, pace, and interruptions.

Ratings for each phrase, each speaker, and the whole conversation
How the tone changed: how the customer sounded at the start versus the end
Separate ratings for the customer and the agent

Use cases

Where it's used

Picking calls for quality review instead of random sampling
Finding the topics and processes that frustrate customers most
Alerting a supervisor when a customer gets upset mid-conversation
Estimating satisfaction when a customer skipped the survey

Limitations

The system is bad at detecting irony and sarcasm
Frustration is often about the situation – a delay, a price – not about the agent
Accuracy depends on transcription quality and on how well the model knows your customers' language

Use with careSentiment is a reason to listen to a call, not a final verdict on the agent's performance.

In CONTACT.WORK

How it works in CONTACT.WORK

Sentiment is detected by speech analytics, which also identifies topics and checks the conversation against your scorecard. That way supervisors review the calls where customers were unhappy, not random ones. Reviewers add their own scores and notes to the automated rating – for example, what caused the customer's frustration; this works for calls, chats, and email.

The platform itself is free. Speech recognition for sentiment analysis is a paid service, and you can also run it on your own server with a GPU.

Where to use it

Speech analytics Find the calls with unhappy customers Learn more Reports See quality scores by agent and topic Learn more Speech analytics for quality management Learn how to review every call, not a sample Learn more

Backlinks

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