Prediction of customer’s perception in social networks by integrating sentiment analysis and machine learning

Abstract Understanding the customer behavior and perception are important issues for motivating customer satisfaction in marketing analysis. Customer conversation with customer support services through social networks channel provides a wealth of information for understanding customer perception. Therefore, in this paper, a hybrid framework that integrated sentiment analysis and machine learning techniques is developed to analyze interactive conversations among customers and service providers in order to identify the change of polarity of such conversation. This framework aims to detect the conversation polarity switch as well as predict the sentiment of the end of the customer conversation with the service provider. This would help companies to improve customer satisfaction and enhance the customer engagement. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is measured by extracting a real dataset that expresses more than 5000 conversational threads between a customer service agent of an online retail service provider (AmazonHelp) and different customers using the retailer’s twitter public account for the duration of one month. Different classical and ensemble machine learning classifiers were applied, and the results showed that the decision trees outperformed all other techniques.