Why Your Sentiment Analysis Is Wrong

The marketing team is excited. They just added sentiment analysis to the customer feedback pipeline. Every review, survey response, and support ticket now gets a sentiment score. Red is negative. Green is positive. A dashboard shows the company's overall sentiment trending up and to the right. Three months later, the product team is confused. Sentiment scores are great, but customer churn is increasing. How can customers be so positive while they're leaving? The problem isn't the sentiment analysis. The problem is how it's being used. The Sarcasm Problem "Oh great, another app that crashes every time I try to use it." What's the sentiment here? The words "great" are positive. An unsophisticated sentiment analyzer will score this positively. A human instantly recognizes the sarcasm. This customer is furious. Sarcasm inverts sentiment. It uses positive words to convey negative meaning. And it's everywhere — in reviews, in support tickets, in social media. The more frustrated people are,