Customer Sentiment Analysis: Everything You Need to Know

How does customer sentiment analysis work?

The analysis of customer sentiment simply means that you can work out how your customers are feeling. This can be done in a few different ways, including the automatic detection of emotions during customer engagement.

Natural Language Processing, or NLP, is one of the most common methods used for customer sentiment analysis. The algorithms tend to use polarity and magnitude to analyse customer emotions and separate them neatly into categories.

See below for the definitions of these terms.

Polarity: Whether the emotion is negative or positive

Magnitude: Indicates the strength of the emotion

Use NLP for analysing customer interactions

Natural language processing is one of the main tools that can assist with analysing customer sentiment. This can be implemented through AI and allows your technology to separate the language used in customer service interactions based on the predetermined categories. Your business can then collect the data on magnitude and polarity and look at this alongside contextual factors like mapped issues and data over time.

Gather customer feedback

Feedback can be incredibly valuable for businesses in all types of industries. From brick-and-mortar retailers to e-commerce sites, you should never underestimate the importance of gathering feedback from a wide variety of your customers at as many points as possible.

Whether it’s after purchase or when a customer abandons their cart, contacting them asking for feedback can give you valuable insights into the emotions they felt at different points and ultimately why they did or didn’t purchase from you. The feedback can then be collated and analysed to look at the most common thoughts, feelings and emotions at different points of the customer journey.

Use social media

Social media is a very powerful tool, and it’s only going to get stronger. A negative social media presence could do serious damage to your brand reputation if you’re not careful.

Monitor the main social media sites using your brand name to see what people are saying about you. By analysing the data on social media, you can find out the polarity and magnitude of your customer’s opinions.

Monitor service and product reviews and ratings

We’ve all been faced with rating buttons asking us how we felt about our experiences, usually ranging from zero to five or showing angry to happy emotions. Whether you’re shopping with an online retailer or you’re in the airport, these buttons are everywhere, and there’s a good reason for why.

These buttons help businesses monitor customer emotions towards their brand quickly and easily, with little to no effort required from the customer.

Create personal connections and interactions with your customers

The more you get to know your customers, the easier it should be to understand how they’re feeling about your brand. The tricky thing here, though, is that customers are usually only likely to initiate these types of interactions when they’re at extremes of emotions. Whether they’re really happy with their service or they’re incredibly disappointed, you’ll probably hear from them if your communication lines are open. And while these interactions can be valuable and show you where you’re doing things right or where you’re going in the wrong direction, it doesn’t tell you anything about those that feel the emotions in between the extremes.

The solution to this could be adding exit surveys after customers engage with your representatives or chatbots to find out what they thought. It could also be good to add in more opportunities throughout the user experience where customers can voice their opinions. Of course, you don’t want to bombard them with too many pop-ups, so keep things minimal and non-invasive so that their user experience isn’t interrupted by these things.

The more personal interactions you can have, the better your understanding of customer sentiment will become.