Looking at Product Gaps with AI to Identify Demand

1) Sentiment analysis

AI-powered sentiment analysis tools quickly scan social media platforms, online reviews, and forums to gauge public sentiment regarding existing products. Sentiment analysis is critical to understanding how customers and your audience view information and whether attitudes are good, pessimistic, or impartial.

When sentiment analysis is regularly performed on text-based information, you can leverage opinions in customer feedback to comprehend customer needs.  AI enables companies to analyze customer opinions, emotions, and feedback to pinpoint areas where current offerings fall short. Imagine the possibilities when your team can effortlessly zero in on customers’ unmet needs, recurring complaints, and unsatisfied desires to gain an edge over the competition. You can guide product development with a deeper understanding of what customers actually want.

Sentiment analysis enables you to:

• Glean meaning from unstructured data
• Identify and address customer issues
• Enhance your business strategy and pivot to fill in product gaps
• Develop smarter, more empathetic chatbots with human-like responses to help customers find the products they need
• Help reduce customer churn with an ever-improving product offering

Outshine the competition with a more comprehensive product line.

2) Competitor analysis and benchmarking

AI-driven competitive analysis goes beyond basic market research. You can identify the most relevant players in your market and set benchmarks based on their best practices. You can then use AI machine learning algorithms to systematically compare your products against competitors’ offerings.

In turn, you can quickly identify gaps and find actionable opportunities based on features, pricing, customer reviews, etc. By benchmarking your products against the competition, AI helps you identify areas where your products can stand out and meet unaddressed customer needs.

You can understand desirable similarities and find better ways to stand out and improve your unique value proposition. This is also an opportunity to leverage AI to find niche segments without time-consuming, outdated methods like focus groups and company-driven research. Also, you’re able to use AI to monitor these companies

Benchmarking

So, you always keep in step with their initiatives, matching or improving on them. Using different types of AI-generated analysis and benchmarking tools enables you to monitor the competition on all fronts, including social media, SEO, content, and advertising to improve your performance across all channels.

3) NLP (Natural Language Processing) surveys and feedback analysis

Natural language processing (NLP) is what AI uses to understand human language. For example, NLP-powered surveys and feedback analysis enable AI to discover more profound insights into customer opinions and preferences.

AI can process survey responses and customer feedback through NLP and look for recurring words and themes to reveal your customer’s “unspoken needs.”

This uncovers latent demands that customers might not explicitly state in multiple-choice surveys. That is why it is essential to include general text boxes enabling customers to share specific feedback or details for an online customer complaint form.

While a drop-down menu or multi-choice surveys collect generalized information, AI with NLP capabilities can find similarities in general comment text boxes.

Feedback analysis

AI enables you to make those stories and detailed accounts actionable. It aggregates qualitative data to spot trends and gain invaluable insights to drive informed business decisions. You can “metricize” open-ended feedback with minimal effort for huge gains.

Most companies don’t have the resources to sit a team down to tag and sort customer comments. This is expensive and, although valuable, isn’t justifiable when you try to scale it. However, using NLP, suddenly, you can do in seconds what would have taken your team hours to achieve.

And it is far more detailed and logical, making it easier to decipher product gaps and product-related requests. You can finally discover opportunities in open-ended feedback to optimize insights and improve product listings.

AI can identify product gaps and unspoken needs to help you gain a competitive advantage. You can quickly analyze data, perform sentiment analysis, and use benchmarking to identify growth opportunities and improve your performance.

NLP also enables you to conduct effective feedback analysis and identify unmet needs to ensure you are proactive in meeting customer expectations. You’ll remain one step ahead of the competition to finally gain the market share you deserve.