Understanding what customer sentiment is and how to track it is essential for the health of your business and your bottom line.
When you focus on improving your customer sentiment score, you can achieve significant results, such as greater customer satisfaction, increased customer loyalty and retention, continuous positive purchase behavior, and elevated long-term growth, among other relevant KPIs.
In this article, we’ll explore what customer sentiment is and why it’s an important metric for businesses. We’ll also look at four methods for measuring customer sentiment.
An introduction to customer sentiment and the importance of tracking it
So what is customer sentiment exactly? It’s a measure of the emotions, attitudes, and opinions customers have toward your brand, product, or service. It takes into consideration customer feelings, whether they’re positive, negative, or neutral.
Every element of your business impacts customer sentiment, from customer service to product quality and pricing. Gathering customer sentiment data can provide critical insights into customer satisfaction and loyalty, and it can help you identify areas for improvement.
Keeping track of customer sentiment also allows you to understand your customers’ needs, expectations, and preferences so you can improve the customer experience, increase customer satisfaction and retention, reduce churn, and increase your revenue.
Customer sentiment will tell you how people perceive your brand and give you reliable insights into what you can do to elevate your brand’s reputation.
An overview of the customer sentiment score
The customer sentiment score is a quantitative representation of your customers’ feelings, emotions, and attitudes toward your brand, product, or service, as expressed in data you gather from various sources.
These sources include social media listening, direct feedback you collect from forms embedded in your website or sent to customers via email, and surveys and scoring methods such as Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) surveys, customer satisfaction score (CSAT) surveys, and customer effort score (CES) surveys.
The benefits of measuring customer sentiment
Understanding customer sentiment — and acting on it — is vital to building a thriving, healthy business that’s competitive in the marketplace.
How exactly can measuring customer sentiment benefit your business? Let’s look at a few of the advantages it can deliver.
Understand customer expectations better
Assessing customer sentiment using customer survey tools and metrics — like NPS, CSAT, and CES surveys — or direct feedback can help you determine what your customers expect and if they feel like you’re meeting those expectations.
If they do, that information can show you how to create better experiences to meet their expectations. This in turn will lead to greater customer satisfaction and increased customer loyalty.
Solve problems before they occur
Monitoring customer sentiment can help you identify and resolve issues before they escalate. Once you spot the warning signs of customer frustration, you can step in early and turn things around, keeping customers happy, satisfied, and loyal to your business.
Improve your brand’s reputation
Identifying and remedying negative brand sentiment gives you the opportunity to make things better for your customers and provide a superior customer experience. And happy customers are much more likely to spread the word, recommending your business to others and improving your brand reputation in the process.
Prepare your staff to respond more effectively
A deep knowledge of customer sentiment allows your staff to prioritize and resolve serious customer concerns before they intensify. It also helps you track trends in customer feedback, which you can share with staff on the front lines so they’re better equipped to care for dissatisfied customers.
When your staff understands how customers feel on a deep level, they’re more empowered to meet customer expectations and deliver exceptional service.
Increase your revenue
When you ask customers for their feedback and make appropriate adjustments in response, you foster a positive relationship with them. As a result, you’re more likely to retain current customers and attract new ones, leading to enhanced business growth.
Other benefits of measuring customer sentiment include more informed decision-making, reduced customer churn, a deeper understanding of your competitive advantage, and more opportunities for cross-selling and upselling.
4 ways to measure customer sentiment
There are several methods for measuring customer sentiment. We’ll focus on three approaches to measuring customer sentiment through surveys — Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer satisfaction score (CSAT), and customer effort score (CES) — as well as direct feedback.
1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
A Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey is a questionnaire organizations use to determine whether their products, services, and programs meet their customers’ needs. The NPS score measures how loyal customers are to an organization.
The process involves asking customers a single question: “How likely are you to recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?”
Answers are scored on a scale of 0–10 (least likely to most likely to recommend), and the results are grouped into three categories: promoters (scores of 9–10), passives (scores of 7–8), and detractors (scores of 0–6).
To calculate NPS, divide the number of customers in each group by the total number of respondents to determine the percentage of promoters and detractors. Next, subtract the detractors from the promoters to arrive at a score, ranging from -100 to 100.
What’s considered a “good” NPS score varies by industry, but a score of 50 or more is generally thought to indicate high customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Jotform’s free online NPS survey template makes it simple to measure customer sentiment. Simply embed the form on your website, share it with a link, or send it via email, and you can begin collecting responses immediately. Using Jotform as an NPS survey tool allows you to collect responses from any device and analyze them in one centralized location.
2. Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)
CSAT is another scoring model. A CSAT survey ranks customer satisfaction on a percentage scale from 0–100 by asking customers how satisfied they were with your service on a five-point scale ranging from very dissatisfied to very satisfied.
To calculate the CSAT score, divide the total number of satisfied and very satisfied customers by the total number of survey responses and multiply by 100.
For example, if 300 respondents complete the survey and the total number of satisfied and very satisfied customers is 250, your calculation would look like this: (250/300) x 100 = 83 percent customer satisfaction.
You can use one of Jotform’s customer satisfaction evaluation form templates to calculate a CSAT score. There are many templates to choose from, including this customer satisfaction survey, plus over 30 other options to meet your survey needs.
Want to learn more? We have guides on how to measure customer satisfaction, how to get customer feedback and improve customer satisfaction, and how CSAT and NPS compare and which may be the best approach for you.
3. Customer effort score (CES)
A CES survey is another useful model for measuring customer sentiment. A CES survey assesses how easy or challenging customers find it to get their concerns resolved on a seven-point scale, from very difficult to very easy, known as the customer effort score.
These surveys can pose questions about returning or exchanging products, navigating a website help page, getting questions answered, and other points of customer interaction with a business.
Jotform’s free CES survey template makes it easy to get started. With it, you can collect feedback to help you better understand your customers and identify ways to improve their experience with your company. Customize the template to add your desired questions, then embed the survey in your website or share it directly with a link.
You can also create your own scoring model using Jotform’s customer satisfaction evaluation forms. You can add different question types, including open-ended questions, rating scales, multiple-choice questions, input tables, and more. Then you can leverage the power of Jotform Tables to easily track and analyze survey results.
4. Direct feedback
To get a holistic measure of customer sentiment about your brand, you’ll also want to incorporate customer feedback using methods such as feedback forms on your website and other online channels, as well as social listening via your social media platforms.
An easy way to collect direct customer feedback is by embedding feedback forms into your website or emailing them to your customers after they make a purchase or have some other interaction with your brand or business.
You can create your surveys easily using Jotform’s drag-and-drop online survey maker. You can add your own questions, set up conditional logic, customize the design, and share your custom survey online to start collecting responses instantly. After you’ve gathered the data, use Jotform Report Builder to analyze the results and generate beautiful visual reports.
3 tips to improve customer feedback
The process doesn’t stop with collecting customer feedback and understanding customer sentiment. The next step is to use the data you’ve gathered to enhance the customer experience.
Here are three simple suggestions for using feedback data:
- Address your customers’ pain points. Use the results of customer surveys to uncover recurring pain points and challenges. These insights will allow you to prioritize areas of customer dissatisfaction, implement strategies to address those issues, and make improvements that align with your customers’ expectations.
- Personalize your customer service. Use customer data and sentiment to personalize communication during each part of the customer journey. Research by McKinsey reveals that personalization increases revenue, as customers are more likely to make initial and repeat purchases from a company and recommend it to others when the company tailors interactions to meet user preferences.
Focus on continuous improvement. Don’t stop collecting feedback and measuring customer sentiment after the first round. Set up a feedback loop in which you collect and review data regularly, use it to improve customer satisfaction, then measure customer sentiment again, implementing the insights you discover to continuously increase your score.
Photo by Mikhail Nilov
Net Promoter®, NPS®, NPS Prism®, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., NICE Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld. Net Promoter ScoreSM and Net Promoter SystemSM are service marks of Bain & Company, Inc., NICE Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.
Send Comment: