Customer sentiment analysis: A tool for business development

Introducing new products and services in the market is always challenging. You cannot readily determine the absolute direction for your business, especially if it’s new in the industry. 

The only communication you can get is to learn how to determine your customers’ experiences in availing your service or product offer.

Having a customer sentiment analysis is very helpful but is often positioned to be the least priority, as some businesses tend to focus only on executing marketing campaigns.

Remember that learning customer sentiments will not only give criticism but can also open ways to improve and empower your brand. 

In this article, learn more about how customer sentiment analysis can be effective in business development. We will provide you with an overview of its ways and why its impact is vital to your organization. 

Why is customer sentiment analysis important?

Hearing the word sentiment and analysis connects us to the word improvement, which signifies a call to take significant action. 

Whenever there is a need to improve or sustain your company’s offerings, the only way to assess the ideal action is to learn your customers’ general feelings or emotions. 

The overall journey while interacting with your services, products, and even advertisements translates data that can be analyzed and interpreted.

Customer sentiment analysis measures customers’ thoughts toward your brand. Performing online marketing in many ways contributes to its successful emergence in the industry.

The good thing about gauging customer satisfaction through sentiment analysis is that factors can go beyond just negative and positive points of view.

It can be more specific about expressing personal feelings and perceptions to get direct recommendations and help improve your brand.

The apprehension explains why most organizations value customer sentiment analysis. It is because they see it as an effective tool that directly empowers businesses today.

Ways to collect customer sentiment data

As mentioned, online marketing and advertising strategies allow the collection of customer insights and sentiments.

Organizations collect feedback and opinions from current and potential customers, where data and information help the team construct the patterns and logic of complaints.

From there, companies can now determine the ideal way to improve their products and services and ensure loyalty and satisfaction. 

Here are the most common ways to collect customer sentiment data:

Social media comments and video reviews

Browsing through social media platforms is one of the effective ways businesses can get current customers’ feedback about your brand. 

Social media comments and reaction video content can be a great source to harness data that can be processed and evaluated through sentiment analysis. 

Exploring more than a single platform is also an advantage. Remember that not all social media platforms are one-size-fits-all. 

Customers stay active depending on their tastes and preference. The more platforms we have, the higher reach we can get. 

Visiting customer reviews in forums and websites

Apart from sending comments and reviews, customers’ curiosity can lead to more sharing of thoughts and ideas. It paved the way for some to create forums and review websites.

Most companies include this as part of their customer service engagements. Specific teams are assigned to handle the research and monitoring of insight by visiting review websites and forum pages.Collecting data from non-traditional sources

Non-traditional sources can maximize gathering insights. These include chatbots, customer emails, and customer support services transcripts, usually present in a customer relationship management (CRM) tool.

It can also give you more detailed information that sometimes cannot be easily identified through social media listening or online surveys.

Analyzing news, articles, and podcasts 

Combining news, articles, and podcasts grants businesses access to insights about their brand performance and perception. 

Reflecting market feedback in a news article builds high publicity and can scale brand reputation management.

Exploring beyond quantitative surveys

Quantitative surveys online are one of the commonly used customer feedback metrics for gathering customer insights. 

Tools like net promoter scores (NPS), customer effort scores (CES), and star ratings can provide a prompt picture of whether the customers are satisfied with your product and service. 

But the real challenge is that it doesn’t offer actual business insights. The business has to exert more effort to go beyond quantitative metrics and properly analyze an open-ended survey result. 

Surveys should be backed and matched with other ways of collecting data where buyers and customers can write comments to expound their answers on quantitative surveys provided.

How can customer sentiment analysis help improve your business

It is not surprising that customer sentiment analysis brings impact and improves the systems and processes of a business to communicate a more powerful brand. 

Identifying first-hand opinions and shared thoughts from your customer is the most reliable source where improvements and innovations can be derived. 

Customer sentiment analysis can improve businesses by transforming customer insights into better sales conversions, client relationships, and acquiring new customers.

It encourages business leaders to enhance branding efforts and set more ideal targets to improve advertising and marketing communications.

In addition, sentiment analysis can also serve as your constant measure to stay ahead of the market competition. In some instances, product offers are often compared to other existing products and services. 

It helps many businesses establish exceptional customer experience and loyalty while planning retention initiatives to address negative feedback and insights.

6 customer sentiment analysis best practices

While we already mentioned some strategies, expounding knowledge on some of the most effective practices in conducting customer sentiment analysis can be very helpful. 

Here are some of the customer sentiment analysis best practices that can help your business develop and grow successfully:

1. Enhance sales generation 

The businesses’ core efforts and hard work always center on gaining profit. Aside from strengthening marketing strategies, knowing the organization’s strengths and weaknesses is an advantage.

Customer sentiment analysis will help improve efficiency and productivity by setting a clear direction to what and where the business should focus based on the interpreted data. 

By understanding customers, identifying what product is in demand, and which areas of services can be improved, a brand can explore more potential to increase sales generation.

2. Reputation management

Customer sentiment analysis is also fundamental for companies to protect and supervise their reputation, given the influence of social media, which directly affects the image of any business.

It is a free platform where people can air opinions and critics online without many restrictions. 

Apart from the company’s own review platform, other kinds of customer insights where different facets of business discussed can translate to become room for improvement are vital.

3. Personalized recommendations

The voice of the customer sentiment analysis has the ability to reach more personal information, referring to what the customer likes and prefers.

Their purchase history and customer service logs in the company’s CRM or other customer service tools can be a source of recommended actions.

These strategies apply to both below-the-line and above-the-line marketing, where the brands can create personalized ideas and innovations through newsletters and advertising. 

4. Stay ahead of the competition

Reinventing and continuous improvement to keep connected and adapt to changing times are some of the main actions a business can take to stay relevant in the market.

Aside from aiming for high customer loyalty, the logic as to why some brands remain strong is that they keep up with the trends. They acknowledge the pulse of the public, reflecting the importance of excellent customer experience.

5. Product re-branding

Brands have to be adjusting through the eyes and tastes of the customer, given that economies continuously evolve and socio-cultural differences emerge globally. 

Customer sentiment analysis can be a great tool to draw a strong future for brands. It has the ability to determine if the products or services are still harmonizing with the trend or come up with a decision to rebrand as an intelligent action.

6. Customer retention and attracting new customer

Customer sentiment analysis can provide actionable insights backed with data interpretation to create schemes and methodologies to help retain existing customers and attract new ones.

Determining customers’ expectations of your brand in delivering service and customer satisfaction can help you appropriately address pressing issues and negative opinions. 

Instead, you can easily organize ways to foster a stronger relationship and attract potential customers.

Importance of customer sentiments in emerging digital businesses

We cannot deny the power vested in social media and other online platforms as a venue to share insights and different points of view.

E-commerce and other business platforms now curve a name in the online market world. It is relevant and advantageous to learn what people think about a business virtually.

Despite so many marketing strategies that organizations may adapt, the information shared online about a particular product or service affects the overall standing of a business. 

Accurate sentiment analysis can help capacitate digital businesses to communicate with their customers by providing clear and ideal actions they can implement.

And with this, businesses can learn to enhance marketing strategies and advance customer experience. They can maximize the advantage of sentiment analysis as they gather customer statements and interactions.

Statements and perceptions closest to reality usually come from a customer’s personal experiences towards a brand’s products and services from a general online environment.