customer-sentiment-analysis-tipsEnsuring that customers have a positive experience is one of the most important goals of any business. People tend to purchase more following a positive experience with your business, while a negative experience will often lose you customers.

The problem comes in determining what customers like and dislike about your business, enabling you to make improvements.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) has long been used as a way to determine how customers feel about businesses. But many businesses now realize that on its own it is too basic. It’s for this reason that customer sentiment analysis is becoming increasingly important.

The Problem with NPS

NPS is often seen as far too basic. NPS involves using surveys to determine what customers think of various aspects of your business, and the idea is that you can then use this information to make improvements.

However, NPS is biased because when asking people to fill in a survey, it will typically be filled with responses from people who are either very pleased or very disappointed. It is also not representative because most people simply will not respond to a survey.

NPS does provide a basic awareness of sentiment and it is not well enough defined. It misses essential details about how customers feel, and it only uses information from particular customers rather than across the board.

This is where customer sentiment analysis comes in.

Customer Sentiment Analysis: What Is It?

Accurate customer sentiment analysis goes deeper than NPS because it can be used to find out exactly what customers like and don’t like.

Sentiment analysis involves working out what people feel when they make a comment, whether on a blog comment, a social media post, or a support ticket. It works by using algorithms to determine whether phrases are positive, negative, or neutral.

At its most basic, it involves assigning a value to each word from the dictionary, and it then uses the words in the sentence to work out whether it is positive or negative. So while “Great customer service” would be positive, “I can’t find the right product” would be negative.

But this is very basic, and more advanced algorithms are required to go deeper. Language is complicated, and people may use far more subtle expressions when commenting about your business.

More advanced algorithms use large data sets to learn more, and they go beyond just positive and negative to determine emotions like anger and frustration as well. It also takes account of the fact that people talk differently in different settings.

To get even more from customer sentiment, you have to look further. The sentiment itself is just one thing. What is really useful is determining why a customer feels a particular way. What are they happy about? Frustrated with? Is it your product? A specific feature of your product? Your customer service?

It’s important to find more specific issues, especially recurring ones, so that you can make the required improvements.

How to Use Customer Sentiment Analysis

There are various ways that you can use customer sentiment analysis in your business. Here are a few of the most important uses for this technology.

Improve Areas that Perform Badly

You can use sentiment analysis to work out the specific areas that need improving in your business. It is not enough to simply determine whether customers are pleased or disappointed overall. By finding out which specific areas are performing badly, you can make the required improvements.

Use Alongside Demographics

You can also use sentiment analysis alongside other data, especially demographics. This can help you to determine which customer segments care the most about particular areas of your business. You can then use this information to change how you target people in particular demographics, such as age, location, gender, etc.

Follow Changes in Your Business

When you make large changes to your products and services, you can use sentiment analysis to work out how customers respond. For example, you might change your web design or an element of your product. While a survey may lead to a lot of negative reaction, you may find that overall the response is positive when you use sentiment analysis.

Use Social Analytics

One of the best ways to use sentiment analysis is on social media platforms. By using a service like Chatmeter, you can analyze your reputation across various social platforms based on the comments that people are leaving. You can then react to negative or positive sentiment appropriately and speedily.

Start Using Customer Sentiment Analysis

You can use customer sentiment analysis to go way beyond NPS and gather much more detailed information about how your customers feel about different aspects of your business. If you are not using it yet, start looking into the option of implementing sentiment analysis so you can take advantage of all the benefits it provides.

Author

Collin Holmes, founded Chatmeter, Inc in 2009 and serves as Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Holmes is a graduate of the University of California, Riverside and graduated with an MBA from San Diego State University. Prior to Chatmeter, Mr. Holmes served as Vice President of Product Management and Director of Product Marketing for xAD, Inc. (LocalAdXchange) (also known as V-enable). Mr. Holmes comes with a couple decades of overseeing and developing product roadmaps, business development and managing the process of driving applications to market.