What Is Customer Sentiment

A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all! 

Almost every business depends on its customers to ensure its success and earn good revenue and profits. If customers are happy and love a specific brand’s products or services, they will remain loyal to the business because they feel positive about the brand.

You often read or hear about a restaurant or cafe that has bad service. Although it may have good food, you may avoid going there with others because your recommendation will be deemed bad. The fundamental idea is to run a business that results in positive customer sentiment. 

Customer sentiment is a metric that measures customers’ feelings and opinions about a business, its brand, its products, or its services. Businesses are highly affected by customer sentiment, as it directly affects customer retention and the addition of new customers. Bad customer experiences cost businesses 6.7% of their revenue, or around $3.1 trillion. Businesses that include customer sentiment metrics in their internal business policies often have higher goodwill and better customer retention. 

However, positive customer sentiment is only part of a seamless customer experience. Businesses must develop extensive and comprehensive customer experience policies to ensure positive customer sentiment. How to do it? Leave it to us! 

Atidiv is the master of creating unmatched customer experiences. With over 15 years of experience, it has served 70+ clients across 20+ industries; it can help you create a positive customer sentiment and ensure profitability and sustainability. 

Let’s understand customer sentiment and how it can help your business achieve new heights! 

What Is Customer Sentiment? 

Customer sentiment refers to customers’ opinions, emotions, attitudes, and perceptions about a business, brand, product, or service. For example, if you bought a brand product for the first time and loved it, your sentiment towards the brand will be positive. Based on this, you are more likely to buy the product again or buy other products of the same brand. 

In the past, an individual’s customer sentiment did not affect a business. However, social media platforms have increased this effect as more customers continuously share their thoughts online to express their opinions or experiences. If such opinions and experiences are positive, they result in positive customer sentiments, as more customers are likely to use the businesses’ products or services. On the other hand, if they are negative, they result in negative customer sentiment, as customers are less likely to buy the businesses’ products or services. 

Customer Sentiment and Customer Experience: They Go Hand-in-Hand

Customer sentiment directly affects customer experience, as the former is a Key Performance indicator (KPI) for the latter. Customer sentiment metrics contribute to the calculation of customer experience, allowing businesses to gauge how customers are treating their business based on their expressions, emotions and perceptions. 

Customer sentiments can be positive, negative or neutral. 

• Positive Customer Sentiment: Positive customer sentiment refers to customers’ positive emotions and perceptions about a business and its products and services. If customers have a positive sentiment about a business, they are more likely to buy its products or services again. 
• Negative Customer Sentiment: Negative customer sentiment refers to customers’ negative emotions or perceptions about a business and its products and services. This means that customers are less likely to buy the brand’s products and services in the future and may switch to a different brand. 
• Neutral Customer Sentiment: Neutral customer sentiment refers to customers’ emotions or perceptions in which they express no strong or negative feelings about a brand and its products and services. This means that they may or may not continue using a specific brand’s products or services. 

Customer Sentiment Metrics Through Tools and Models 

Customer sentiments are measured through customer sentiment analysis models and tools that use advanced technologies and algorithms. These are: 

• Artificial Intelligence (AI) 
• Machine Learning (ML)
• Natural Language Understanding (NLU)
• Natural Language Processing (NLP) 
• Natural Language Generation (NLG)

Businesses utilise such tools and models to measure customer sentiment metrics. Afterward, they use the results in their customer experience models to improve customer retention and increase sales. The customer sentiment tools and models measure customers’ opinions, feelings, emotions, and perceptions in an aggregate manner rather than providing results about individual customer opinions and perceptions. For example, 

• If 80 out of 100 interactions about a brand, its products and its services are positive, the brand is considered to have a positive customer sentiment. 
• If a brand has 50 negative and 50 positive integrations, the customer sentiment is considered neutral. 
• If less than 50 interactions are positive, the customer sentiment is considered to be negative. 

The Importance of Customer Sentiment 

Here is why customer sentiment is important for brands worldwide, irrespective of their nature of business: 

• Enhancing Customer Experience: A single bad experience can cause your brand to lose one out of every three customers, and two or three negative experiences can cause your brand to lose a staggering 64% of its customers.
  
  Focusing on customer sentiment can help your brand pinpoint any bad customer experience and rectify it before it spreads to a majority of customers. An improved customer sentiment will provide a direct result by improving the overall customer experience. 
• Revenue: What would happen if the customers you serve through your business are completely satisfied and happy? They buy more products and tell others that your brand’s products or services are amazing. The result? You will add more customers along with having the current ones, increasing the overall sales and revenue. 
• Loyalty: When your customers are satisfied and happy and trust your brand’s product and services, they become loyal. Customer loyalty is the by-product of positive customer sentiment and ensures that the customers keep using the products and services of your brand. Even when your competitors come out with new products or services, you can be assured of customer retention. 
• Exposure: If you research customer experience, you will learn that customers talk to almost every person they know about the products or services they have used or are using. Studies have shown that around 50% of customers post their experiences on social media, while 72% talk about their experiences in person. If their sentiment is positive, their experience-sharing will result in adding more customers. Hence, a focus on customer sentiment to make it positive can go a long way in adding new customers and increasing your brand’s sales. 
• Marketing: 92% of consumers trust recommendations from friends and family more than recommendations from any other form of advertising. However, if the overall customer sentiment is high, recommendations from friends and family and other forms of advertising prove successful. Advertising and marketing can help you understand what customers like and make changes to improve their sentiments. 

How To Measure Customer Sentiments 

You know now that customer sentiment is one of the most impactful contributing factors toward customer experience. Now, the burning question: How do we measure customer sentiment? What do you and your brand have to do to know what the customers think about your brand, products, and services?

Here is how you can measure customer sentiment: 

Surveys and Feedback Forms: 

• Create a survey or a feedback form. 
• Mail them to your current customers or post them on your social media. 
• You can use scores from a scale of 1 to 10 to rate their experience or ask them to write about any negative experience they have faced. 
• Assure them that the feedback will be taken seriously to ensure a better customer experience in the future. 

Online Reviews and Ratings 

• You can ask your customers to post online reviews on online platforms or post comments on your brand’s social media channels. 
• You can ask your social media team to analyse the reviews, read the comments, and create a customer review report. 
• The top executives can analyse the report and turn the data into actionable customer sentiment metrics. 

Sales Data

• You can ask your sales team to curate the sales data for a specific period, such as a month, quarter, semi-annual or annual. 
• Ask them to pinpoint repeated sales and an increase in sales for specific products. 
• You can analyse the data and convert it into measurable metrics using customer sentiment models and tools. 

Customer Support Interactions

• Create a process where every call that comes to your customer support is recorded for quality and training purposes. 
• You can employ an analysis team to analyse all the calls and categorise them based on the products or services for which the calls were made. 
• The data will help you understand which product or service is facing the highest customer complaints. 
• You can create a process or policy to improve the products, services, or overall experiences to ensure a positive customer sentiment. 

Want A Positive Customer Sentiment? Choose Atidiv! 

Customer sentiments are hard to track as the aggregate data is in bulk and complex in nature. If you do not track customer sentiment metrics, forget about a seamless customer experience. But don’t worry, you focus on your business and let us focus on measuring and tracking customer sentiment metrics. 

With every interaction your business has with a customer, Atidiv turns it into valuable metrics that can provide valuable sentiment insights. We speak the language that is required to track and analyse such data to ensure you can improve customer sentiments and, ultimately, customer experience. 

With Atidiv’s 200k+ customer experience delivered and a 4.8 average CSAT rating, your business is in good hands. Schedule a call with Atidiv today to unlock the benefits of customer sentiment metrics. 

FAQs on Customer Sentiment

Q.1: What is customer sentiment, and why is it important? 

Ans: Customer sentiment refers to customers’ emotions and opinions about a brand, product, or service. It is important because: 

• It helps businesses understand customer experiences. 
• Improve product or service quality
• Manage or improve the brand’s reputation. 
• Enhance customer loyalty and retention. 
• Increase sales, revenue and profits. 
• Provide a competitive edge. 
• Increase exposure online. 

Q.2: What is the difference between customer sentiment and customer experience? 

Ans: Customer sentiment refers to the emotions and opinions customers have about a brand, product, or service, often measured through reviews, social media, and feedback. Customer experience (CX) is the overall interaction and journey a customer has with a company, including service quality, ease of use, and satisfaction. The sentiment reflects how customers feel about their experience, while CX is the entire process that shapes those feelings.

Q.3: How can brands collect customer sentiment data? 

Ans: Brands can collect customer sentiment data through: 

• Surveys and feedback forms
• Online reviews and ratings
• Analysing sales data 
• Reviewing customer support interactions

Q.4: How can a brand analyse customer sentiment? 

Ans: Once the data about customer sentiment is curated, brands can use various tools and models to turn the data into measurable metrics. These are: 

• Artificial Intelligence (AI) 
• Machine Learning (ML)
• Natural Language Understanding (NLU)
• Natural Language Processing (NLP) 
• Natural Language Generation (NLG)

Q.5: How can a business improve customer sentiment?

Ans: Businesses can improve customer sentiment by quickly addressing negative feedback, engaging with customers on social media, enhancing product quality, offering better customer service, and rewarding loyal customers. Continuous improvement based on customer insights helps maintain a positive brand image.

Q.6: What are different types of customer sentiments?

Ans: Customer sentiment can be positive, negative, or neutral. Positive sentiment indicates customer satisfaction, negative sentiment reflects dissatisfaction, and neutral sentiment shows indifference. Companies can use customer sentiment metrics to determine whether their brand, products, and services have positive, negative, or neutral customer sentiment.