Can you determine whether customers feel positively, negatively or neutrally about your brand? If not, your company may be missing out on opportunities to foster long-lasting customer partnerships and accelerate its revenue growth. Ultimately, sentiment analysis reporting can make or break a business. With the ability to understand consumer sentiment, business managers can make informed decisions to drive consistent business improvements. What Is Sentiment Analysis? To better understand sentiment analysis, let's first consider the role of customer data for today's business managers. Typically, managers want to evaluate customer data as much as possible. Doing so can help managers obtain deep customer insights and understand why customers may choose one brand over another. Plus, managers can use customer insights to analyze all aspects of the customer journey and incorporate meaningful business enhancements day after day. Although managers want customer insights, transforming customer data into actionable insights can be difficult. In many instances, managers rely on text analytics services to collect customer feedback from across the web. Yet text analytics fails to provide managers with a quick, effective way to generate meaningful customer insights. Text analytics commonly is used in combination with data mining, i.e. a time-consuming and costly process that involves analyzing all of the customer data that is available. As such, managers usually will have to spend many hours performing data mining if they want to obtain relevant customer insights. And in most cases, managers are forced to deal with the complexities of evaluating large collections of structured and unstructured data – something that makes it exceedingly difficult to gain actionable customer insights. Now, sentiment analysis reporting helps managers get the most out of the customer feedback available to them. Sentiment analysis reporting allows managers to use the customer data that they retrieve via text analytics and transform this information into pertinent customer insights quickly. In fact, managers can use this reporting to check the pulse of its customer base at any time. Moreover, sentiment analysis reporting drives immediate and long-lasting business improvements, especially for managers who leverage the combination of text analytics and Self-Service Text Analytics. Text analytics and Self-Service Text Analytics represent complementary services. Managers can use text analytics to obtain customer feedback from blog posts, web polls and surveys and other online sources. Meanwhile, Self-Service Text Analytics is a free, user-friendly data analysis service that works with text analytics to help managers produce sentiment analysis reports. Unlike a traditional data analysis service, Self-Service Text Analytics requires no data mining. Conversely, managers only need to upload an Excel spreadsheet that includes user-generated content via Self-Service Text Analytics. After the upload is finished, managers will receive a sentiment analysis report only minutes later. Each sentiment analysis report displays consumer sentiment data via visualizations. This ensures managers can review charts, graphs and other illustrations to understand customer behaviors and trends. If managers want to find out how customers feel about a product or service, a sentiment analysis report makes it simple for them to do just that. Or, if managers want to review how a company's brand reputation stacks up against a business' rivals, a sentiment analysis report ensures they can gain competitive insights as well. Together, text analytics and Self-Service Text Analytics provide managers with superior sentiment analysis reporting capabilities. The services enable managers to collect and analyze a broad assortment of consumer sentiment data with ease. As a result, managers can gain unprecedented insights into consumer sentiment, discover innovative ways to connect with customers and help a company bolster its products, services and customer interactions. Summary Consumer sentiment data is available to business managers around the globe via myriad online sources. However, few managers can capture pertinent insights hidden within this data due to the time and costs associated with comprehensive data mining. But a new data analysis service is available that empowers managers with advanced consumer sentiment analysis reporting capabilities – Self-Service Text Analytics. Managers can use Self-Service Text Analytics in conjunction with text analytics to gain deep insights into customer feedback and tailor their business efforts accordingly. That way, managers can quickly transform consumer sentiment data into actionable insights and find ways to improve a company's brand reputation and build long-lasting customer partnerships.