How To assess Customer Sentiment and Why It’s significant

If a customer had a negative shopping encounter with you, they would inform you. correct? 

Not always. Research shows only 16% of customers use social media to air their grievances, and only 22% write something on a third-event review site.

But just because the majority of customers aren’t publicizing their thoughts doesn’t cruel you can’t discover how they feel about your brand. Through a customer sentiment analysis, you can uncover what your customers ponder about your corporation and get better insights into the effectiveness of your customer service throng. 

What is customer sentiment?

Customer sentiment is a metric that captures your customers’ positive, negative, or neutral attitudes toward your brand and products. Customer sentiment can also include how your customers feel about your industry and competitors—even current events and trending topics. Improving overall customer sentiment for your brand can navigator to more satisfied customers and long-term customer loyalty. 

You can track customer sentiment in various ways—through surveys and social listening tools, for example—to better comprehend how elements of your shopping encounter influence customer attitudes. For example, a period-consuming checkout procedure can garner negative customer sentiment, while customer interactions with a knowledgeable, patient representative can outcome in positive customer sentiment.

Why assess customer sentiment?

• enhance the customer encounter
• Identify customer strengths and weaknesses
• Tap into customer interests

Customer sentiment is a qualitative customer service metric that can be as powerful as sales data when it comes to boosting brand loyalty and overall satisfaction. Here’s why businesses gather, assess, and analyze customer sentiment: 

enhance the customer encounter

Customer sentiment reveals where you’re excelling and where you can enhance. For Gyve Safavi, cofounder of the toothbrush brand SURI, measuring customer sentiment was an chance to enhance its product offering, from font size to checkout. As Gyve describes on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast, all of those improvements arrive from customers describing their pain points.

Identify competitor strengths and weaknesses

Knowing why customers have a negative sentiment toward a competitor can reveal gaps in their schedule that you can aim to fill. On the other hand, learning why customers have a positive sentiment toward a competitor can illuminate where you might be lacking and provide a blueprint for exceeding expectations.

Tap into customer interests

When you gather customer sentiment data, you’re learning what your spectators cares about and why. Use customer sentiment analytics as your North Star to discover what sparks thrill in your customers and what would navigator them to purchase.

5 ways to assess customer sentiment

1. Surveys
2. Social media listening
3. Messaging apps
4. Shopping customization
5. Customer sentiment scores

Getting a pulse on how customers feel about your brand might seem challenging since you can’t just read their minds. Luckily, there are several customer sentiment analysis tools and techniques at your disposal, including: 

1. Surveys

Some of the best customer data comes from customers themselves. inquire customers to fill out feedback forms or receive customer satisfaction surveys to distribute their opinions with you. This is a ordinary habit for gaining insights into customer service interactions. You can also use surveys to receive direct feedback on the standard of your back interactions, customer trip, and overall products and services.

Gyve used customer feedback surveys to assess customer sentiments on other electric toothbrush brands. “We realized there was a dominance of a few brands in the category, but nobody actually loved them,” he explains. “Half the period they couldn’t name [the brand],” he says. It identified a huge chance for the SURI throng to develop both a better product and more effective brand messaging. 

2. Social media listening

Customers distribute their opinions, views, and feelings on social media platforms, and social listening tools allow you to keep tabs on all of them. With the assist of social media monitoring tools, you can analyze the tone of customer comments that mention your brand, track the overall sentiment of online reviews, spot issues before they become major PR disasters, and address customer questions in a positive, constructive way that builds brand depend. Both positive and negative customer sentiments can open up recent opportunities to construct throng and fix any frail spots in your customer encounter. 

3. Messaging apps

Sometimes, assembly customer sentiment can arrive down to excellent, ancient-fashioned chats. Nadya Okamoto, founder of the period worry corporation August, started out talking to her target spectators members over Zoom calls and texting. “I was using iMessage and just literally texting people,” she says on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. This can provide you an intimate look into how customers ponder and feel.

Messaging your customers is an invaluable form of direct feedback that can navigator to actionable insights. Focus on messaging platforms relevant to your core customer demographics. If you’re a physical business, discover city or local platforms where locals gossip and distribute current events and tips. 

For online businesses, discover the forums and comment sections where faithful customers live. And recall, this isn’t the place for marketing campaigns—customers don’t always desire their personal online spaces or private chats overtaken by brand marketing. Instead, focus on listening, building relationships, and assembly customer opinions to use as data points. 

4. Shopping customization

As customers shop, there’s a huge chance to gather customer sentiment data about what they desire and why. What they gravitate toward and add to their carts reveals a lot about their preferences and what they are willing to spend on a product—but so does what they aren’t adding to their cart and what they abandon. When you add customization to the mix, you can get a sense of what customer expectations are.

For example, Nadya uses a series of product customization options to let customers inform her exactly what they’re looking for in their subscription. “Consumers can arrive on and inform us exactly what they require, the assortment of tampons, pads, different sizes,” she explains. She can then use this information as a foundation for ideal customer profiles and upcoming product offerings.

5. Customer sentiment scores

If you desire a more quantitative way to assist you enhance customer sentiment, use modern software that evaluates customer sentiment through customer sentiment analysis algorithms and natural language processing. 

Analyzing text, audio, and video of customers talking about their feelings toward a topic or brand, customer sentiment analysis tools assign a score on a scale of 100. For example, a 90% sentiment score is positive and 50% means it’s mostly negative. You can use this sentiment analysis score as a standard. So, when you implement a recent checkout flow or more detailed protocols for your customer service throng, you can check back in a few months after implementation to view if it improved your customer sentiment score.