What is Customer Sentiment and How Can You Benefit From It?

Companies or business people need to know and meet customer expectations. When the company cannot fulfill it, then this can affect the profits or profits of the company itself.

This is why companies need to find out what customers feel and think about their brand. This is what is called customer sentiment. Get to know more about customer sentiment and how to capitalize on it.

What is Customer Sentiment?

Customer sentiment is a metric to evaluate the feelings that customers have towards a brand, product or service. It reflects the customer's opinion, emotion or perception of their experience in interacting with the business or brand.

Customer sentiment can range from positive to negative, and can influence purchase decisions, customer loyalty and overall brand image. Knowing these sentiments can help companies to gain customer trust and increase their revenue.

Customer sentiment can help companies to know what customers like and what they don't like.

Research conducted by Zendesk revealed that 66% of consumers who have a bad experience with a brand can make them feel annoyed. Not infrequently these bad experiences also lead to consumer anger and dissatisfaction.

The research also revealed that more than half of customers who have a bad experience with a company or brand will switch to a competing company.

Benefits of Customer Sentiment

Research conducted by Zendesk found that two-thirds of consumers will become repeat customers when businesses place importance on how customers feel.

This is why it is important to be able to capitalize on customer sentiment for business people. Here are some ways to capitalize on customer sentiment:

• Measuring the success of the marketing efforts undertaken
• Gain a deeper understanding of customer demographics by region, age and more.
• When knowing that customer satisfaction is down, business people or companies can identify and find out the cause so that the company can overcome the problem.
• Track down customers who have negative experiences or thoughts about your business and fix them.

If you can take advantage of this customer sentiment analysis, the company can reduce the percentage of customer churn (the percentage of customers leaving your business or stopping using your business services).

Apart from that, it also increases cross-selling and up-selling opportunities. If it turns out that customer sentiment shows a negative direction stemming from interactions with certain agents, then the team leader can use the analysis to retrain the employee.

Various strategies can be adapted to the causes of negative sentiment experienced by customers. In order to carry out this technique, there are a number of sentiment analysis or customer sentiment steps that need to be carried out, including:

• Data collection: Text data will be collected from product reviews, social media and feedback provided by consumers.
• Preprocessing: This is the process of cleaning and transforming text data to remove various information that is considered irrelevant.
• Feature extraction: At this stage the text data obtained will be transformed into numeric features for later analysis.
• Sentiment classification: This stage uses machine learning algorithms to help analyze text and classify it as negative, positive or neutral tones.

How to Use Customer Sentiment

If the customer sentiment data obtained is just left alone, then the data becomes useless. The data you get can help you to fix problems with your product or service if you make good use of the data.

Here are some ways to take advantage of customer sentiment data.

1. Mapping the Problems Revealed by the Data

When analyzing the customer sentiment data obtained, look for every type of problem that could annoy the customer. According to Zendesk research, customer sentiment data can be narrowed down to about 20 issues.

By doing this, you can anticipate problems that may occur in the future and know how to deal with them.

2. Sort Data Based on Type of Customer

You can also use this method to clarify the responses or feelings of each customer. For example, do new customers show satisfaction or do old customers have certain complaints.

You can also break down information based on demographics such as gender, age and region. All of this information data will help your business to target strategies that can meet these customer expectations.

3. Check Data Over Time.

You can check customer sentiment data from time to time to monitor spikes or changes in negative or positive sentiment from customers. You can also find out whether the surge in sentiment occurred after carrying out a new strategy, launching a new product or other activities that occurred in your company or business.

In general, a business may get new challenges when knowing the sentiments of customers. However, knowing this can help your business grow through clarifications taken based on customer feedback.