Why Customer Sentiment Analysis Matters and How to Improve It

Best Practices

by   INSIGHTLY TEAM

Customer sentiment analysis is, in simplest terms, the study of how your customers feel about you. If that sounds a little vague, consider this: one in three customers say they would leave a brand they love after just one bad customer experience. 

Keeping a pulse on your customers’ evolving sentiment toward your brand is key to success. The problem? How do you track something as nebulous as feelings? And how do you connect customer sentiment to your overall strategy? 

In this blog post, you’ll learn more about how to track customer sentiment, why it matters to your bottom line, and tactics you can use to improve how your customers view your brand. 

What is customer sentiment analysis?

Customer sentiment analysis encompasses many parts of an automated process that tracks how your customers are reacting to your brand, services, or products. It’s more than just a quantitative measurement of customer interactions. Rather, it qualitatively assesses emotional responses to your brand. Often, sentiment analysis uses advanced technology like AI, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and machine learning (ML) to evaluate emotional nuance in text.

For example, sentiment analysis in social media might track how many times users mention your brand, but it might also gauge the tone of those mentions, e.g. were they positive, negative, or neutral?

Successful sentiment analysis can aggregate customer reactions across multiple platforms – voice, text, social media, reviews, customer feedback surveys, and more. Even a basic assessment of positive and negative reviews online can give explosive insight into your overall brand reputation. 

Why is customer sentiment analysis important?

It almost goes without saying: How your customers feel about you affects your bottom line. Your whole team can benefit from this analysis, from sales to marketing to product to finance.

Here’s how. 

Improve your customer service KPIs

Customer sentiment analysis can impact nearly all of your customer-focused KPIs, including:

  • Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
  • Net Promoter Score (NPS) 
  • Customer Effort Score (CES) 

By understanding customer emotions at every stage of their journey, you can pinpoint problem areas in your KPIs and identify growth opportunities. 

Your CRM should allow you to integrate all of this information in a single, easy-to-use customer experience dashboard. Then, you can predict and respond to customer needs more effectively using real-time visualizations.

Gain and retain customers

Improving your customer sentiment score can help you reduce churn and increase customer loyalty. 

Just look at this study by PWC: in the United States, nearly 60% of customers will leave a brand after several negative experiences. On the other hand, customers will pay a 16% price premium for brands that deliver positive experiences.

In this study, the customer’s positive or negative impression became the deciding factor in their loyalty toward that brand. In other words, improving customer sentiment is a direct path toward building loyal customers.

Build marketing campaigns that work

Companies use sentiment analysis to refine their marketing message and identify weak points. 

For example, a sentiment analysis study by Edelman in 2020 found that customer sentiment changed significantly in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Over half of the survey respondents said they felt negatively toward brands with lighthearted or humorous marketing. 

Without that insight into negative sentiment, a company might spend thousands on a lighthearted marketing campaign that ultimately loses customers.

Improve your products and services

Customer sentiment can tell you a lot about the quality of your products and services. A key component of sentiment analysis is customer reviews and ratings, which take the guesswork from product improvements, new product releases, and more.

After every product release, you can run customer sentiment analysis to figure out what’s working, what needs tweaking, and how to improve the next product release overall.

Of course, those reviews are useless if they aren’t getting analyzed and sent to the right people. The key to success here is to break down silos between your teams. A unified CRM could help your product team start to understand customer sentiment.

3 ways to improve customer sentiment

Customer sentiment is a moving target. To improve it, you need high-level visibility into ever-changing customer data and the ability to respond to those changes nimbly. Consider the following three focus areas for improving customer sentiment. 

1. Capture and measure customer feedback

As always, the first step is awareness. To improve customer sentiment, you first have to measure it. Sentiment analysis tools can track customer feedback through many platforms, including:

  • Social media
  • Surveys
  • Focus groups
  • Market research
  • Customer ratings and reviews
  • Live chat
  • Support tickets
  • Email responses
  • Customer service interactions

Sophisticated algorithms analyze all this data and deliver insights you can act on. 

2. Make things easy at every customer touchpoint

Your customer interactions define how they perceive you. It’s your job to educate your customers and help provide answers whenever they have an issue. In fact, making things easy for customers is the most important way to boost positive sentiment.

An article by the Harvard Business Review explained it this way: “When it comes to service, companies create loyal customers primarily by helping them solve their problems quickly and easily.”

To do that, integrated CRM software can help to make customer engagement simple. The right platform can align your customer-facing teams through dashboards that integrate all your customer data in one place. You can instantly respond and engage positively with every customer. The easier it is for you, the easier it is for them.

3. Continuously improve

Use your customer insights to keep improving with every engagement. Customers can see when brands are moving in a positive direction. Use a CRM that supports this level of growth.

At Agrando, the leading independent solution provider for digital agricultural trade, Insightly’s integrated dashboard changed the game for their business strategy. 

Their CEO and Co-Founder, Jonathan Bernwieser, said, “Dashboards are the primary way that [we] track the performance of our business and make decisions about how to grow our business for the future. The entire company has access, and now, everyone has a consistent view of our performance, even if you only have a couple of minutes on your way to getting a coffee.”

With this powerful tool in hand, Agrando responded nimbly to customer needs, improved KPIs, and put themselves on track for greater growth.

Improve customer sentiment with Insightly

Customer sentiment analysis is a critical metric to impact your bottom line. By measuring and understanding customer sentiment, you can refine marketing messaging, identify the root causes of customer complaints, improve customer service, and boost customer loyalty.

The key to all of this is finding a tool that can aggregate and track all of this disparate data in one simple place. Insightly makes analysis easy through a user-friendly CRM dashboard. 

Contact Insightly to start a free trial now and see how customer sentiment analysis can change the game.