Fundamentals of Customer Sentiment: Must Follow Business Strategy in 2023

[ad_1]

Do you know that “70% of customers get frustrated when they do not get an individual experience”? To create a personalized customer experience, your first step should be to know the sentiment of the customers.

At the moment, customer sentiment is gaining acceptance as one of the top segments of business strategy. So, if you are running a business or as a business strategist Customer Sentiment is not on your bucket list, that means you are not touching one of the best parts of the business strategy of growing sales.

The current market is highly competitive. To stay ahead of the competition, you must focus on consumer sentiment along with other relevant business strategies. These strategies might improve your company’s customer experience and help you stay on top of the competition.

Just take a deep breath if you feel overwhelmed knowing about the fundamentals of customer sentiment. Go through this blog post and clarify your concept.

What is customer sentiment (a basic interpretation)

Before we begin, we want to explain this concept in simple words.

Customer sentiment is the viewpoint of a consumer about your product, service, or brand. It’s an exposure (after-effect) of a consumer’s feelings or emotions when they engage with your product.

Now, let’s dig deeper with an example.

Picture a WordPress user facing a crucial choice: selecting the ideal helpdesk plugin for their new project. They come across Fluent Support and Awesome Support, both familiar options.

One might expect a logical evaluation of pricing, features, and usability. But reality often defies expectations. Emotion plays a significant role. A user’s attachment to a product stems from their experience.

If Fluent Support delivers a superior user experience, they’re more likely to return to it. In short, decisions aren’t solely driven by logical analysis. Memorable user experiences hold substantial sway.

Since this kind of emotion may break or build a business, positive emotions about any product should be good for skyrocketing your business’s growth. In a more technical term, consumer sentiment is a metric, a KPI, indicating how a customer feels about your business or brand. It’s a qualitative measure of the customer experience.

Types of customer sentiment

All of your consumers may not be the same. Different consumers may have different ideas about your products or services. So, their sentiments may not be the same. Below, we have mentioned the three types of customer sentiment.

Positive sentiment: You are doing great. Keep it up and follow the consistency.
Neutral sentiment: Not bad. But work more on your brand to establish a positive sentiment.
Negative sentiment: Something is wrong with your product. Work on it and find a solution.

Customer sentiment analysis

You need to use customer sentiment analysis to understand the emotional connection between your business and customers. So, first, let’s know about customer sentiment analysis.

You may put the concepts of ‘customer sentiment’ and ‘customer sentiment analysis’ in the same bucket. If so, you are thinking wrong. They are related but have individual meanings and purposes.

Customer sentiment is the genuine feeling that a customer holds in his mind. On the other hand, customer sentiment analysis involves systematically analyzing and understanding consumer thoughts on our products or services.

In this whole process, you have to use a variety of tools, techniques, and methodologies.

Customer sentiment analysis is an automated process of discovering and measuring the collected data. The data you can acquire from customer reviews, social media posts, surveys, and so on.

Following the process, you can understand and discover the emotional connection that your client has. So, you can understand your users’ sentiments qualitatively.

Why is it important to know about consumer sentiment analysis?

Generally speaking, after some bad experiences, a customer will never want to use the product again. Research shows that “66% of consumers are eager to pay more to businesses for an amazing experience”.

So you have to make sure about the quality of your product to grow positive sentiment, otherwise, your business strategy will be less effective.

According to studies, “Consumers with good experiences with your brands are more likely to spend 140% more. Additionally, 70% of customers feel frustrated when they do not receive a personalized experience”.

Therefore, you must round up all types of consumer sentiment to analyze them in-depth. Doing this will provide you with an insight into their sentiment. Also, it will help you identify where your products or services need to be improved.

The most important thing is that you can find out about your negative customers. Negative customers are harmful to your business because they spread lousy words in the market.

Be where your customers are!

Hear your customers wherever they need you.

3 best customer sentiment analysis tools

Searching for the best tools for analysis can be confusing. To dilute your dilemma, we have chosen the 3 best tools. You can easily complete your analysis with any of these tools.

1. HubSpots Service Hub

Hubspot’s Service Hub includes a consumer feedback tool that evaluates survey responses. It can determine whether qualitative survey responses are positive or negative. It uses an NPS survey to determine customer reviews (good or bad).

2. Userpilot

Userpilot is cloud base software. This is a product adoption and comprehensive product growth tool where you can set up an online survey. Userpilot is very easy to use, and none of the features require any coding.

3. Talkwalker’s Quick Search

Talkwalker’s Quick Search is a social media search engine. It works best with your social media tool since it can tell how people feel about your company’s social media accounts. Quick Search can perform sentiment analysis on your social mentions in 25 languages.

All three of those tools have really good reviews, and users love them. Each of them has benefits and drawbacks. We tried to give a little idea about them. You can check the features, pricing, pros, and cons of the tools mentioned above. Just pick one and start analyzing your customers’ sentiments.

3 best methods for collecting customer sentiment

Here are the 3 best methods that you can leverage for collection your customers’ sentiment.

Arrange interviews with users

An interview with a consumer regarding the product is the simplest and most direct method of estimating sentiment where a user can interpret all the pros and cons of the products they used.

In the interview process, you have to ensure a proper environment by giving them the space to speak out. Just build a connection with them to get all the information they think about your brand.

Sometimes, you have to deal with difficult consumers. Here, you have to be more practical. Just follow some simple tips that we have mentioned below –

It would help if you listened more than you speak.

Understand the consumer’s way of thinking.

Ask questions to get to the bottom of their issue.

Establish a common connection.

Come up with a solution or recommendation that makes them cheerful.

During the interview process, you must keep your language professional, friendly, and respectful, as you represent your brand.

Sometimes, measuring feedback from the interview is more complicated than a survey because the responses could be unorganized. Try to put it in a structured way to solve the difficulty. And one thing is that you should arrange an interview when:

You introduce a new product.

You wish to reframe the current brand you have.

You want to extend the value of your current products.

Qualitative survey

Gathering all of that data about consumers’ experiences seems like a difficult task. But with a structured qualitative survey (properly designed), you can collect powerful data about how they think (positive, negative, neutral) about your product.

A customer survey is one of the most common methods for collecting feedback from users. You can easily find out and measure their sentiments, like satisfaction or understanding expectations.

There are two ways to present your question:

Close-ended (answering the query in your own words)
Open-ended (predefined set of answers)

Customer surveys are primarily focused on quantification. You can conclude your survey using these 4 distinct types, commonly referred to as the most prevalent forms of customer satisfaction surveys.

Net Promoter Score (NPS): Net Promoter Score is developed by Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company, and Satmetrix in 2003. It is used for measuring customer loyalty measuring the willingness of customers to recommend a company’s product or services to others.

Customer Effort Score (CES): The Center for Customer Insights (CEB) created Customer Effort Score in 2010. This survey metric is used for measuring customer experience.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): Customer Satisfaction Score came about in 1994. This metric is used for measuring the level of satisfaction that customers convey by using our product or service.

Product-Market Fit (PMF): The founder of Product-Market Fit is Andy Rachleff. This metric describes a scenario in which a company’s targeted customers are telling others about the company’s products or services after buying and purchasing.

In the survey method, it is not possible to create a face-to-face interaction like an interview. But the survey method is appropriate in several ways for collecting sentiment.

What many consumers can’t say in an interview process, they can answer more fluently in the survey method. Moreover, organizing interviews with customers is more challenging and time-consuming.

Social media monitoring

Social media is one of the ways to connect directly with consumers nowadays. Through this method, users can answer comfortably from behind a screen. It is a unique process to get feedback from them and to engage one-on-one.

Various social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. are used for collecting feedback. Therefore, gently encourage those who buy from you to share testimonials publicly. That will create engagement.

Also, if there is any issue related to the product, try to solve it publicly. Don’t convert it to private. Either solve it instantly or assure them that you are considering the issue if it is complex.

On social media, sometimes consumers provide critical feedback or negative comments that everyone can see. Face it with patience and try to convert it from negative to positive.

Wrapping up

Understanding customer sentiment is essential. Positive sentiment can greatly impact your business. Prioritizing it as a strategic goal is highly recommended.

As this business strategy is a game changer, just gather accurate customer information, focus more on positive clients, and win over unhappy shoppers.