Deciphering Voice of the Customer using Text Analytics and Sentiment Analysis: An Interpretable Review Rating Prediction using RoBERTa

Abstract

In this era of cut-throat competition among traditional and newer digital organizations, capturing, listening, and understanding customer voices are critical for success in the marketplace. The challenge to decipher the voice of the customer (VOC) has multiplied many times today, as now the number of customer reviews are present in multiple platforms and the data to be analyzed is huge. Sentiment analysis, and text analytics using machine learning, deep learning tools and transformer-based tools can be applied to gather meaningful insights from these data. This paper applies the traditional machine learning tools of the Naive Bayes classifier, Random Forest and AdaBoost to predict the customer review ratings. These results are compared with deep learning methods of CNN, RNN and Bi-LSTM and transformer-based approaches of BERT, DistilBERT and RoBERTa. The results show that RoBERTa has the highest accuracy among these methods. Paper also uses the explainable AI tool of LIME to understand the customer sentiments deeper in terms of why customers are giving a particular rating to the product. Business organizations will continue to use more and more AI tools to understand the customer feedback and the attempt in this paper is to learn how we can make predictions faster and more accurately.