A customer sentiment analysis tool may be one of the most valuable tools you can use in business. It involves measuring whether customers have positive or negative sentiments towards your business. You can carry out types of sentiment analysis in many different ways - from manual to sentiment analysis technologies.
Doing so gives you a sentiment score by which you improve and analyze your business as a whole. Having an idea of customer satisfaction is absolutely vital if you want to run a business successfully. In fact, it is one of the critical ways to increase customers in restaurants and hotels.
Having a sentiment score can help you avoid bad experiences for customers in the future. Measuring sentiments acts as a way of utilizing customer feedback. You can use online reviews in this process or send feedback forms via QR codes or captive portals.
The whole process is easy with some initial effort - creating an almost passive form of analysis. The best analysis system for user sentiment should collect customer feedback automatically. There’s also room for the influence of machine learning in consumer sentiment’s future. Hold this space for the future of AI and this analysis.
Are you ready to take a deep dive into the value of customer sentiment as a vital form of analysis? In this guide, we’ll tell you how to analyze customer sentiment, including why and how to do it. It can feel overwhelming, so let’s break it down into basic steps and categories. You’ll be ready to analyze in as little as 5 to 10 minutes.
What Is Customer Sentiment Analysis?
First things first: What is customer sentiment analysis? While we discussed a loose definition above, it really helps to settle on a concrete definition before proceeding. So, in this section, let’s do exactly that.
To understand this analysis, you have to understand customer sentiment. Customer sentiment is just how a customer feels about your business. How a customer feels about your business changes based on various factors.
For instance, your brand image and values, their experiences with your business, and customer support. These factors shape how customers positively or negatively view your business. And therefore, these are the factors you should pay attention to when requesting customer feedback. Sentiment is just feeling. Feelings change, so by measuring them, there’s also a chance to utilize the service recovery paradox.
So, clear on customer sentiment? What about analysis specifically? What does that actually look like? Well, sentiment analysis is just observing and drawing conclusions from the data on how customers feel. This could be manual; you create a way of measuring qualitative review data.
With this, you draw conclusions and decide on your analysis method. Or you can analyze sentiment through technology. Lots of software offers automatic analysis, leaving stats and feedback for your business on a dashboard.
Nowadays, it is common for businesses to measure customer sentiment through technology. Your journey to sentiment analysis will likely start with shopping for the latest software.
This analysis is just measuring and drawing conclusions from customer feedback. You can do it manually or through technology, which can greatly impact your business success.
How Can Sentiment Analysis Be Used To Improve Customer Experience
So, how can sentiment analysis improve customer experience? That’s actually an easy question. By knowing how your customers feel, you are in a better position to address their needs. Think of sentiment analysis as a branch of target audience research. Learning about your customers is a continual process; you don’t just find your target audience once and then quit. Researching your target audience and measuring ongoing sentiments is how to target customers effectively.
There are numerous ways that conducting sentiment analysis can improve and boost your business. These are the top few benefits of measuring customer satisfaction and feelings towards your business:
- It helps you address pain points early on.
A significant benefit is that they help you address pain points early on - before more customers experience them. This could be as simple as cutting waiting times.
When you learn about the psychology of loyalty for business owners, listening to your customers is massively vital. You need to build loyalty among customers, and listening to and valuing your customer base is how to do it.
- It directs business improvement.
Improving your business without direct feedback is no good. You will need to figure out what changes to implement. Therefore, one of the critical benefits of sentiment analysis is that it shapes and directs your business improvement. You won’t be scaling and adjusting blindly.
Benefits of Customer Feedback Sentiment Analysis
By now, you are crystal clear on what exactly sentiment analysis is. This is great and exactly where you should be at this point. But what about the benefits of sentiment analysis? What do you gain from this specific type of analysis?
In this section, we will answer that, giving you better insight into why you should even bother with sentiment analysis. It is essential to have your ‘why.’ And having your ‘why’ is all about understanding the direct benefits you access from investing in a strategy. So, with that said, these are the top four benefits of customer feedback sentiment analysis.
Better Customer Relationships
This is a big one. Customer relationships are the end=all be-all in business, and investing in sentiment analysis nurtures these relationships. When you invest in hearing their thoughts, you make your customers feel connected and understood. You should always appreciate the power of listening - it can seriously transform how customers feel about your business. It’s an ironic benefit when you think about it.
Not only do customers feel understood and positive towards your business when you conduct analysis, but it also opens communication. Opening communication creates an ‘open door’ environment and builds rapport. Customers know that if they have a problem, you’ll care to listen. And honestly, that’s half the battle. Having better customer relationships is definitely a leading benefit of sentiment analysis.
More Purposeful and Profitable Services
When you understand customer sentiment, you operate with optimal purpose. You know how your customers feel and what they truly want, so you are better positioned to provide services that benefit them. The flip side of sentiment analysis is that it helps you create more profitable services for your business. Amazing, right?
It is one of the best things about investing in analyzing customer feedback. Your business actually gets a boost. You’ll notice better reactions to your services (you are essentially reading customers’ minds by analyzing and predicting patterns). Furthermore, your business’ services become more profitable since more people want them. The higher the demand, the more profitable your business is.
Improved Customer Satisfaction
It may go without saying, but a leading benefit of sentiment analysis is improving customer satisfaction. This is one of your major ‘whys.’ Listening to your customers increases their satisfaction with your business and services. This is a huge benefit, as it has knock-on effects on your reputation, profit, and marketing efforts.
Happy customers spread joyous - and free - marketing via word-of-mouth. This rockets your profit as existing customers are more likely to return, and new customers are more likely to visit. And if they leave positive reviews or provide word-of-mouth marketing, this boosts your marketing campaigns for free. Partly, we all just want to see happy faces. However, we won’t deny that there are some profound benefits to increasing customer satisfaction.
Improved Decision Making
Finally, sentiment analysis has the considerable benefit of improving your decision-making. We mentioned earlier that this analysis can help you vitally enhance your business. This benefit is similar in that analysis enables you to make vital business decisions from an informed place.
You will have a solid understanding of what your customers want, need, like, and dislike. Because of this, you can be more intentional and effective when making significant decisions.
This could be as simple as adding a new product to your business—for instance, a pumpkin-spiced latte. Before you make this decision, you quickly reference your customer feedback for last year. You find 60% of customers weren’t happy with the drink’s cost-effectiveness, causing a decrease in pumpkin-spiced lattes bought.
To remedy this, you crunch numbers and source cheaper ingredients, allowing you to sell the latte at a cheaper rate. You measure customer sentiment in response to this drink, and voila - 95% positive.
Understanding customer feedback and sentiment can positively shape your business. You’ll be making more customer-focused decisions, which can never be wrong.
Are you ready to make a start? Brilliant. Your first step is to find customer analysis tools; the good news is that there are plenty of free options. These tools will streamline your approach to analysis and make everything much easier. You can analyze manually if you wish. However, it will be more time-effective if you use technology - which is what we’d recommend.
There are lots of options on the market. Let’s take a look at the best choices:
InMoment is one of the leading analysis tools. It offers a 30-day free trial, perfect for cautiously testing the waters before buying. The tool utilizes AI to collect customer feedback and provide valuable customer insights. It also offers 24/7 support and brilliant features.
MixPanel is one of the best options for a free customer analysis tool, offering a cost-free basic plan. It has a really clear dashboard with graph segmentation of results. It specializes in user conversion analysis, so consider which aspect of customer analysis to focus on.
This is another tool that offers a 30-day free trial. The customer analytics platform shot to creation in 2013 and has clever trend and pattern-spotting powers. It also aids win-back strategies for online customers, which is a handy aid.
Final Thoughts: How Much To Budget for Sentiment Analysis
No matter where we are in our business journey, we know the importance of budgeting. So, how should you budget for sentiment analysis? What exactly should you do when budgeting for this new strategy - and will it cost the earth? We’d suggest budgeting between $0 and $40 a month, depending on your choice of analysis software. You can conduct sentiment analysis for free if you choose free software and utilize cost-free review prompts.
If you choose paid software, subscription fees will likely cost around $25-30 per month. And then, you may wish to factor in the costs of setting up data collection. For instance, creating a captive portal is a one-off cost.
Setting up sentiment analysis is generally free. The vast majority of software is either free or costs an extremely low amount. And even if they do cost a monthly subscription fee, you can opt-in for free trials. This drastically minimizes the signup risk.
Once set up, it is hands-off, with everything feeding into each other automatically. Setting up sentiment analysis should be one of your lowest costs in the grand scheme of things. Unless you go totally rogue with a custom analysis program, it won’t break the bank.
Of course, this leads us to Beambox. As an all-in-one WiFi marketing platform, we convert your guest WiFi into your most valuable analytical tool. How? Through captive portals. Captive portals are pop-ups that block guest access to WiFi until they comply with data collection requests. If you want to analyze sentiment, you can make filling out a feedback form compulsory for WiFi access. Start your Beambox free trial now. Customer sentiment analysis has never been more straightforward.
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