Customer Sentiment: Why You Need It and How to Improve It

You can work hard towards building the best company with the highest quality products or services. Still, if your customers don’t think your brand is the best in your industry, it’s all for nothing. You need to keep track of your customers and what they think about your brand, also called customer sentiment.

By measuring and tracking customer sentiment, you can determine your business’ next steps for improving or maintaining this sentiment. How do you know where your customer sentiment is? You need to analyze customer sentiment regularly to get the best understanding of where your brand sits in customers’ minds. Keep reading to get some ideas of what you need to monitor and how to do it.

During your research, make sure to check out Podium and what it has to offer your business.

Podium offers a variety of tools to help you manage customer sentiments, including review management features. More reviews mean more business for you, and Podium’s tools can help you improve how your customers value your business.

What is customer sentiment?

Customer sentiment is an important metric that businesses can use to gauge and measure how customers feel and think about their brand. It may sound like a simple process to measure whether users have neutral, negative, or positive views about your business, but customer sentiment can provide valuable direction to business strategies.

In simpler terms, customer sentiment is like the thermostat by which you measure your customer’s feelings toward your company. Are your customers happy with the service you provide? Are they unsatisfied with your products? Are they neutral about your business, or are they willing to support your brand and recommend it to their friends and family?

These details are important to your company, and what you do with the information is even more crucial. When you perform customer sentiment analysis, you can start collecting data that can be used in a variety of ways, the most important of which is to improve your business.

Benefits of a Customer Sentiment Analysis

There are many benefits to a customer sentiment analysis, not the least of which is understanding your business from the other side of the counter. You can better understand how satisfied your customers are by analyzing this data. But along with that, you can benefit in the following ways:

1. Understanding Customer Perception

Looking at things from your customer’s perspective can be key to understanding where your business is failing and, even better, where it’s succeeding. Customer sentiment analysis can lead you to weak spots to focus on to improve customer satisfaction. It will also point to areas where you’re succeeding and provide insights into customer preferences.

2. Real-time Feedback

Don’t forget to take the time to look through your customer feedback regularly. This is where clients will tell you what their experience was. Regularly analyzing customer sentiment ensures you can address negative feedback promptly and reduce the risk of these sentiments worsening and having a bigger impact on your brand.

3. Identifying Trends and Patterns

Keeping on top of the different trends and patterns will help you to better understand what you need to do to keep growing and where your customer support rests. Studying customer sentiment and identifying patterns will help you better understand whether new customer support strategies like your recent use of machine learning-powered chatbots have improved customer satisfaction.

Trends can also let you know when customer sentiments and customer insights are turning negative and customers are becoming more likely to switch to another brand. This way, you can refine your marketing and customer support strategies to prevent churn and meet customer needs.

4. Competitor Analysis

When tracking customer sentiment and other metrics like Net Promoter Score or NPS, don’t forget your competition. This will help you get a feel for what they are doing that you can aspire to, how good their customer retention is, and, in general, how successful they are.

Moreover, competitor analysis can inform you of any opportunities and unmet needs you can address with new products and services.

5. Product and Service Enhancement

With all the market research and customer sentiment analysis you are doing, use the insights to enhance your products and services where you can. You can also use the data to improve marketing campaigns and customer service workflows. This way, you can improve not only customer satisfaction but also customer retention for your business.

6. Proactive Issue Resolution

One of the best reasons to perform user sentiment analysis is to get a better idea of problems before they become unresolved issues. Tracking customer sentiment means catching an issue before it becomes too large. This can give you a head start on a positive transformation and get your company back on track.

7. Customized Customer Experience

Market research shows treating your customers like individuals goes a long way in improving your sentiment score. Certain customers may be interested in new products, and knowing this helps keep interactions personable. Remembering individual details and asking about them also results in more positive customer interactions. This can have a significant effect on customer sentiment.

8. Measuring Campaign Effectiveness

When you run campaigns for marketing and sales, you need to remember to analyze how well it has worked or if you missed the boat. It’s important to frequently assess what you are doing and if it is working or not. This will ensure you have an effective campaign and can stop a floundering one before too much time is wasted.

How to Measure Customer Sentiment

Measuring your customer sentiment starts with getting feedback from your clients. This may be in the form of customer reviews or surveys asking for customer opinions. Making sure to have access readily available for your customers to provide their thoughts on your products and services can help you get better data.

Some tips for working through your customer thoughts and data are as follows:

1.  Collect Customer Feedback

The first step you need to take is to gather customer feedback. This can be done by tracking social media platforms for mentions of your brand, a process that can be done automatically by different tools. Getting customer feedback also means getting more reviews, which can mean more business for you.

To speed up the review generation process, you can also use tools like Podium, which has a free Google Review link generator. This link generator makes it easier for you to generate links, which customers can click so they can submit reviews. You can put these links in text messages and emails you send to customers.

Keep in mind that customer sentiments can be about different aspects of your business, including product pricing and features, customer service processes, and even recent product launches.

2. Preprocess Data

Once you have all the data gathered, you can start processing and organizing it. In many cases, this means cleaning up data so it’s easier to analyze later. For instance, you can look through all the product reviews and surveys submitted by customers and remove ones with invalid or irrelevant answers. You can also organize data and make sure that there are no duplicates and structural data errors.

By cleaning up the data you’ve gathered, you can make sure that customer sentiment analysis is more efficient and faster. Doing this process each time you do customer sentiment analysis also helps improve the quality of the customer data you collect.

3. Choose Sentiment Analysis Tools

There are many different sentiment analysis tools you can choose from. The best thing is to visit each platform and get a feel for what they offer. These platforms may use different algorithms to help businesses analyze customer or user sentiment.

For instance, Podium has a large selection of tools you can utilize to get a better idea of what your customer data says about your brand reputation and services. Getting the right tools to track your brand mentions across various social media platforms and review sites will keep you in touch with customers’ perceptions and opinions of your brand.

4. Apply Sentiment Analysis

One area that uses sentiment analysis is social media posts and monitoring. This allows a company to get insight into the user experience and what their clients think of certain topics or services. Social media monitoring also helps businesses detect any customer issues early on and resolve these issues before they become big problems.

Aside from social media monitoring, you can also apply your analysis methods to calls, chats, emails, and other messaging touchpoints your team may have with customers. This will give you a more complete picture of customer sentiment for your brand.

5. Analyze and Interpret Results

Once you have gathered data in the form of customer surveys (like customer satisfaction or CSAT surveys) and client interactions, it is time to analyze the information you have collected.

Do your clients generally feel good about your business or are they dissatisfied with the services you provide? This information will give insight into your brand reputation and give you an idea of other aspects of your business’ performance. For instance, the data may also indicate metrics like customer retention and customer churn.

At this stage, you should be able to mine plenty of valuable, actionable insights on improving your brand’s reputation. Understanding the voice of the customer puts you in touch with how your business is doing.

6. Quantify and Report

One of the best ways to quantify your sentiment analysis is to create sentiment scores. Assigning a score to customer interactions can make it easier for you to understand not just the sentiment but its intensity as well.

You can start by evaluating the words in any of your brand mentions and customer interactions. How many are positive? How many of the words are negative? This will lead you to a formula of positive words minus negative words to get you a sentiment score.

You can also use a system where you assign a value of 2 to highly positive sentiments, 0 for neutral sentiments, and -2 for extremely negative sentiments. These scoring systems can also tell you whether you have loyal customers. A customer sentiment analysis tool with natural language processing capabilities can significantly speed up this time-consuming process.

Other scoring systems include star ratings. Once you’ve applied your scoring system to the customer feedback you’ve gathered, you can create customer sentiment reports for easier analysis and record-keeping. These reports make it more convenient for you to compare customer sentiment scores over time.

How to Improve Customer Sentiment: 4 Tips

When you find that your customer sentiment isn’t scoring as high as you want it to, it’s time to start figuring out the best ways to improve your customer sentiment score. Keep reading for a few tips to get you started with improving your customer interactions.

1. Provide excellent customer service

One of the best ways to enhance customer service processes is to make customer communication faster and easier. Going over your system of dealing with clients and reviewing each part of the process to see where you need improvements is important. This will help you stay on the path to excellent customer service by being proactive and nipping any issues in the bud.

2. Personalize Interactions

Personalizing interactions with your customers will go a long way to boosting your customer sentiment score and metrics. For instance, your teams can use past customer interactions on CRM platforms to add context to conversations.

3. Implement Feedback Loop

There are five key steps to implementing feedback loops during the customer journey. These are collecting data and feedback, analyzing the data, acknowledging the findings and acting on them, and then bringing clients up to speed with any updates. The loop begins anew as you gather feedback on these updates.

4. Monitor online reputation

Getting a better feel for your customer sentiment means regularly monitoring your online reputation and reviews as well. Visiting Podium and learning more about tools like their Google Business Profile ROI Calculator will give you a better idea of the areas where you need to improve. This is one of the best uses for the metrics provided by analyzing your data.

Take Customer Sentiment to the Next Level with Podium

You can take your customer sentiment scores to the next level when working with Podium and their all-in-one solutions for customer interactions. The platform offers a range of tools to help you organize customer data and gather more reviews and feedback from customers.

For instance, Podium’s Text Marketing, email integrations, and leads Inbox, make it easy for you to send review links to clients and ensure that submitting reviews is convenient for them as well. This can improve perceptions of your brand and improve word-of-mouth marketing efforts, which helps you make more money.

Pro tip: Use Podium’s AI Review Response Generator to improve customer sentiment and loyalty by responding to the reviews you receive from customer quickly and in a way that feels personalized.

Customer Sentiment FAQs

Q: What is a good customer sentiment score?

A: You can get a customer sentiment score based on the frequency of the negative and positive words customers use to describe your company and their experience. When the scores are under the 50% rate, your customers are having bad experiences and your brand reputation is likely suffering. A score of 80% or higher means that your clients have good experiences generally.

Q: What is customer sentiment analysis?

A: Customer sentiment analysis is the process of finding and measuring what clients think of a product, service, or brand. This is an automated process that uses tools to sort and understand customer data. In most cases, emails, calls, chats, forums, and social media platforms are analyzed to collect customer sentiment data.

Q: What are the different types of customer sentiment?

A: There are three different types of sentiments customers can have. These are ‘neutral,’ ‘negative,’ and ‘positive’ sentiments. There can also be intense feelings, such as happy, not interested, angry, or sad. Getting a feel of your clients’ different sentiments will give you a better idea of business performance and your brand’s reputation.