From surveys to reviews to social media, the amount of customer feedback brands collect on a daily basis can make you feel like you’re living in a glass case of emotion. It can feel overwhelming to be sitting on so much customer data when you don’t know where to start or why you should even be measuring customer sentiment in the first place.

Well, we’re here to help!

What is customer sentiment?

It’s not just a buzzword, we promise. If you look at some of the world’s largest, most beloved brands, they’re likely using some sort of tool to help them collect, analyze, and act on customer sentiment data. In the digital world, there no longer is a huge gap between brands and consumers. How brands make customers feel through their experiences and products matters more now than ever.

When it comes down to it, customer sentiment is critical because relationships are the foundation for everything we do. In both our personal lives and in business, building a strong, two-way relationship that is beneficial to both sides sets the tone for every future interaction

Sentiment is at the heart of understanding, measuring, and improving these relationships. It is the emotion behind customer engagement. When you monitor sentiment, you try to measure the tone, context, and feeling of customer actions. Whether a customer completes a purchase, leaves a review, or mentions your company on social media, there is always an emotional state connected to their action.

Customer sentiment can range anywhere from loving to neutral or angry. It’s a spectrum, and that’s why it’s difficult to measure without any sort of qualitative analysis or context. No matter where your customers fall on the sentiment spectrum, it’s imperative you understand not only what their emotional state is, but what’s driving it.

The value of customer sentiment analysis

In short, tracking customer sentiment helps you understand three major metrics:

  • Overall customer satisfaction: How happy are your customers with the quality of your product experience?
  • Loyalty: Will customers recommend you to a friend and continue using your product, even when competitors come calling?
  • Engagement intent: How likely are customers to engage again in a day/week/month?

Gaining insight into customer satisfaction, loyalty, and engagement intent can be winning insight for your mobile marketing and product strategy, helping your dollars stretch further and your ROI increase. The more you know about a customer’s current emotional state, the more you can tailor your marketing campaigns to provide an engaging, helpful experience and adjust your product roadmap to meet customer needs faster.

Use cases for customer sentiment

Customer sentiment data can be used to impact many different areas of business, but we see most brands using this information to inform product decisions as well as marketing campaigns. However, it can also help with other areas of business from market research to brand reputation and more. It’s critical to measure and analyze customer sentiment because of the large-reaching impact it has across departments.

  • Identifying and utilizing your fans (directing them to leave reviews, encouraging them to share on social media, etc.)
  • Winning back unhappy customers (closing the loop on their negative feedback, following up with them via one-to-one messaging, offering them exclusive discounts if they stay, etc.)
  • Creating more fans by targeting neutral customers (offering them special discounts, driving them towards more engaging experiences, etc.)

In order to take any of the actions listed above, you need to be tracking shifts in customer sentiment which requires you to track data from the same customers over time. This can be really challenging to accomplish if you don’t have the right tools like Fan Signals in place.

Ways to measure customer sentiment

As we mentioned earlier, it can be overwhelming to start thinking about all of the ways in which you can measure customer sentiment in a meaningful way. Instead of trying to master every single channel, we recommend honing in on wherever your most valuable customers are the most (hint: this is most likely your mobile app!).

  • In-app surveys
  • App store ratings and reviews
  • Love Dialog

If you take nothing else away from this article, remember this: Tracking sentiment over time allows you to identify and act on shifts in sentiment. In other words, you can understand why certain people feel the way they do about your brand, and therefore take action to win them back.

Regardless of the medium through which you collect customer sentiment data, remember that all feedback is good feedback. If you have the right tools in place to capture, analyze, and act on this data, you’ll be able to track trends over time and create better customer experiences.

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