What is Customer Sentiment Analysis and What are its Benefits?

When customers engage with any brand and leave a review (favorable or otherwise) on social media or any other platform, there is an associated emotion. Understanding this underlying emotion is important for business enterprises to gain insights into the customers’ psyche and their views about the brand. With sentiment analysis, businesses can capture the psyche of customers when they engage with their brands and help the latter boost customer experience and brand loyalty. For instance, tracking customer emotion or sentiment on social media or any other platform in real-time can help businesses identify and address a critical issue impacting customers. So, why is app sentiment analysis important for brands today?

According to statistics, a positive brand experience can cause customers to spend up to 140 percent more. At the same time, any negative experience with a brand can drive customers to tell 16 people on average about their experience, compared to just 9 people for happy customers about their experience (Source: Deloitte). Thus, customer sentiment analysis metrics can offer deep insights into what customers think about a brand. These insights can be leveraged by brands to offer more of the things that make customers happy and willing to engage more with the brand. Let us understand this aspect in detail.

What is customer sentiment analysis all about?

It is the process of identifying emotions automatically when customers engage with the products, services, or brand of a company and write reviews or engage in any other type of online communication. Customer app sentiment analysis is executed using Natural Language Processing (NLP) or algorithms that have the capability to detect the emotions of the customers: positive, neutral, or negative. This is done by detecting patterns in their online communication and then classifying them. Any app sentiment analysis exercise automates the tasks and helps businesses to divert teams towards resolving customer issues instead of getting bogged down with reading every type of communication. The algorithms to derive customer experience insights use two parameters to analyze and categorize customer communications:

Polarity: Identifies whether customers’ emotions are positive or negative.

Magnitude: Identifies how strongly the customers feel about the brand.

Why does customer sentiment analysis matter? What are the benefits?

In the highly competitive world of today, where the quality of products and services as well as customer experiences differentiate a brand from its competitors, it is important to know what customers feel about a brand. The benefits of undertaking customer sentiment analysis are:

Better customer service: The likelihood of customers leaving a brand after a bad experience is in the range of one in three. Since customer traffic is directly related to better performance and revenue for your brand and business, it is important to find out what makes customers happy or unhappy while engaging with your brand. Through real-time user monitoring, you can gauge the polarity and magnitude of customers’ emotions and remove the factors that contribute to negative customer experiences.

Better return on investment (ROI): User experience monitoring through tools like NLP can help you gauge customers’ sentiments towards your brand, products, and/or services. It can be used by businesses to monitor or track customers’ sentiments towards their competitors’ products or services. The insights about competitors can be used to fine-tune the products’ quality, release, and the mechanism for customer query resolution. This way, digital experience monitoring can help businesses derive better results (ROI) from their marketing campaigns.

Better quality products and services: The quality of your products or services acts as the differentiator and drives customers to either adopt or reject them. With sentiment analysis using a CX assurance platform, you can predict and learn about industry trends, derive insights into new markets and customer choices, and know things that did not fare well with your product releases. The insights can help you upgrade your existing products and innovate to create a new set of products when venturing into a new market.

Better management of brand reputation: Customers can give feedback on your products or services on a number of online platforms, including social media. Therefore, any negative feedback can escalate and impact the reputation of your brand adversely. Using customer experience assurance tools, you can monitor customer sentiments across online platforms about your brand, especially on forums, social media, and your website, among others. This will allow you to deliver positive customer experience assurance and stop the escalation of any negative PR.

Conclusion

Customer sentiment analysis allows you to analyze the issues with your products or services at a granular level and helps you to eliminate them. It can help maximize the index of customer satisfaction by optimizing your marketing campaigns, maintaining your brand reputation, and fine-tuning your product launches.

James Daniel is a software Tech enthusiastic & works at Cigniti Technologies. I'm having a great understanding of today's software testing quality that yields strong results and always happy to create valuable content & share thoughts.