Unlocking Customer Insights: Sentiment Analysis in USSD Banking

Marie Kinti

Sentiment analysis( opinion mining), is a technique used to extract subjective
information from text, including emotions, attitudes, and opinions. It serves as a popular tool for text classification, analyzing incoming messages to determine whether the underlying sentiment is positive, negative, or neutral.
The use of sentiment analysis tools has become more prevalent due to the growth of social media and widespread adoption of online platforms.

In today’s digital landscape, almost every application provides a rating section for
customers to offer direct feedback. So why should USSD banking be an exception?
Banks stand to benefit significantly from obtaining valuable insights about their
banking products and ways to improve the user experience directly from customers. USSD can serve as a channel through which customers can provide
feedback or express their opinions about products, services, or their experiences as customers. This feature could be included as a menu item under self-service
options, enabling customers to provide direct feedback to the bank.

By applying sentiment analysis to analyze the sentiment expressed in these feedback messages, banks and financial institutions can gain a better understanding of their customers’ overall sentiment, identify areas for improvement, and gauge levels of customer satisfaction.

To perform sentiment analysis on USSD messages, similar techniques used in
general sentiment analysis can be applied. These techniques involve preprocessing the text, such as removing stop words, tokenizing, and stemming, and then employing natural language processing (NLP) techniques to classify the sentiment of the USSD messages as positive, negative, or neutral.

However, it’s important to acknowledge that USSD messages often have limited
text length and can be context-specific. While this may be seen as a limitation,
analysis models need to be adapted to handle the specific characteristics and
language patterns found within USSD communications.

Overall, sentiment analysis in USSD will enable banks to gain valuable insights
into customer sentiment , improve customer support processes, and monitor
brand perception. These insights ultimately lead to better customer experiences
and improved business outcomes.