Stephanie Miles an associate editor at the Web Sit Street Fight highlights 6 Tools Small and Medium Businesses (SMB) Can Use to Monitor Customer Sentiment. Sentiment analysis is defined as
“detecting and understanding how the audience is reacting to a brand, either positively or negatively,”
Understanding sentiment is critical to business owners for obvious reasons but more importantly these tools can help shape strategy and determine how messaging is working. For the retail industry this is an important exercise as well as an analysis tool. As I read this article I wondered how the tools Miles presents can be applied to healthcare specifically hospitals and physician practices. Patient engagement and epatients are the rage today can any of these six tools be used to improve not just the marketing but the understanding patients have of their care and their HCP? Here are the tools:
Earshot: This is a proximity-based platform that looks at social media and targets mentions that are near by. The business can use this type of data to determine real-time sentiment near locations to measure the level and quality of interactions.
VendAsta: Monitors customer sentiment over time comparing the good and the bad of customers comments on social media. It can monitor and measure week to week to determine how they are evolving.
Radian6: This tool will analyze social media and provide sentiment for each online post. The results are positive, negative, and neutral. This is a great tool to quickly see what is circling the bowl regarding reputation and step in to fix it.
Swipp: Is a tool to gauge reaction to your social media campaign. This is not monitoring per se but actual widget embedded in online activities, posts, campaigns etc. Customers (think patients) are asked to share their opinion (think understand of an interaction with an HCP). It can so trending over time.
Yext: Want to know quickly when they hate you? Yext tracks customer (think patients again) over time across a tone of networks and review websites. It analyzes reviews and mentions immediately and lets you know.
ListenLogic: This is a social intelligence platform to supply the business with “strategic social insights. These include sentiment, demographics, and influencers. It is adaptive, meaning it will adjust to changing language and ideas.
I see these tools and wonder how they can be used to not only monitor retail sentiment but identify the changing behavior of patients and caregivers as they navigate and work within the provider system or with their HCP. Recently Forbes had and article How Doctors Should Respond to Negative Online Reviews. Some of these tools may be to expensive for the solo practice. For a group practice or hospital these tools seem like they can be used off the shelf as described. Taking it a step further I am thinking these tools can be reworked to determine not just sentiment but to measure change in knowledge of patients. Can they measure the changing language and where and how patients are posting regarding their healthcare knowledge to determine change in understanding which may server as a marker for improved care.
Patient care is at the center of healthcare. We also are seeing the moving of healthcare to retail competitive business and if we can apply tools that are successful in the retail world to improving our understanding of where the patient resides in their sentiment and knowledge we can improve outcomes.