Comprehensive Strategies to Enhance Customer Sentiment for Your Brand

Customer sentiment for a brand is an essential metric that helps a brand analyze the emotions it evokes in its end-users. This metric is a detailed customer tone, language, and intent analysis. When measured correctly and used to strategize marketing campaigns, it can lead to healthy long-term brand-to-user relationships, loyalty, and referrals.

Customer sentiment decodes how your target customers think and feel about your brand. Whether positive, negative, or neutral - customer sentiment can help you know and retain your customers.

Usually, customer sentiment can be measured using traditional tools like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and CSAT. Multiple AI programs can analyze customer language and tone and are more agile. It is one of the most important metrics to measure customer success.

Before analyzing customer sentiments, you must understand how customer sentiment scores are calculated.

What is a customer sentiment score?

The customer sentiment score is the cumulative value of the measured event. In simpler words, each phrase and word of a customer is measured, and then a value is assigned to the event in which those words and phrases have been used. Adding up all such events gives a cumulative customer score, usually 1-100 (1 being the most positive).

This scoring helps in multiple ways. For instance, if you have a ticket with a customer score on the negative scale, you can route it to a more experienced support person who can defuse the situation. Similarly, too many negative scores can be a warning sign of a recurring problem in your product or service.

Let’s now look into the strategies that can help in enhancing customer sentiment for your brand.

Comprehensive Strategies to Enhance Customer Sentiment for Your Brand

1 - Deploy Advanced Social Listening Tools

Social monitoring is about monitoring user conversations on social media about your brand.

Social listening, on the other hand, is more deeper than social monitoring. The scope for social listening is much larger (includes 'listening' across blogs, forums, social media, news sites, and more). It focuses on analyzing and extracting useful insights that can help you improvise your marketing strategies.

Social listening allows you to listen to your users and develop a relationship built on trust. You learn how your users feel about your brand and what content they want to see.

A classic example is Netflix’s DIY videos, where the brand took Netflix and Chill to a new dimension. Netflix heard what their customers complained the most - missing out on episodes while dozing off.

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So, putting things to rest, Netflix has a creative solution: DIY socks that pause shows when you doze off. The video's comments section proves that Netflix has listened ardently to its users.

2 - Establish a Comprehensive Customer Feedback System

Monitoring and analyzing customer feedback can help in creating a better user experience. Your brand must implement a multi-channel customer feedback system so that you can capture customer sentiment across all channels.

Customer feedback is not just about decoding positive or negative emotions. It is more about delving into the nuances and identifying the core pain points, leading to a more personalized interaction. It helps identify trends, good or bad, in how customers react to your brand.

There are many ways to create a comprehensive feedback system. You can have personalized forms, run surveys, ask them for email replies, app reviews, and ratings, and monitor social mentions to know how your customers interact with your brand.

Holger Sindbaek, the founder of Online Solitaire, says, "In our pursuit to enhance customer sentiment, we established a comprehensive feedback system that went beyond mere data collection.

We integrated direct player feedback into our game development cycle, focusing on what our users genuinely enjoyed and where they faced challenges. This approach led to a more humanistic and responsive game design, where each update reflected our community's voice.

As a result, we not only saw a 25% increase in player retention but also a significant rise in positive reviews. It demonstrated that when you listen and respond to your audience's needs, you don't just build a better product; you build a loyal community."

3 - Optimize Customer Support for Personalized Experience

Customer support team can be a great source of information when understanding customer sentiments. Consider optimizing your customer support process to deliver a personalized experience based on customer sentiments.

Simultaneously, make amends automatically to the customer profiles based on past interactions and history in your CRM tool to deliver a more tailored experience.

For instance, when users connect via a website chatbot, implement a customer sentiment tool to capture the emotions of how they are interacting. If the customer is unhappy or the emotion is somewhere close to anger or frustration, auto-assign a representative with proficiency experience in defusing the situation.

This is one of the many use cases where sentiment analysis can help deliver a personalized experience, especially for the support team.

Another use case is to edit and maintain the scripts of your chatbots. A majority of brands use chatbots for the initial customer interactions. Customer sentiment analysis helps understand whether the chatbot scripts are working. You can monitor and edit your scripts to make them more inclusive to smooth the first-level interaction.

Here is an example of how Swiggy’s chatbot handled missing items in an order.

You should also work to deflect support issues by enabling customers and end-users with self-help resources, like knowledge bases, FAQs, resource centers, in-app guidance, and more. By enabling customers with on-demand self-service support channels and resources, your end-users become more self-sufficient and are more likely to become power users.

Companies can build self-service customer experiences with a digital adoption platform (DAP), which analyzes user experiences and events to uncover areas of friction. Launch in-app guided walkthroughs, tooltips, and more to provide contextual support to end-users and overcome common support issues.

4 - Develop a Customer-Centric Loyalty Program

Loyalty programs are one of the best (and most used) methods to evoke positive sentiments in your users. There are many ways to implement such programs.

One way is to incentivize feedback and trigger engagements. For instance, TrustRadius, one of the most trusted platforms for software reviews, frequently initiates an incentivized review program for its users.

How does this help?

• Incentive triggers engagement
• TrustRadius can drive genuine reviews from trusted users
• The loyalty program automatically creates a positive sentiment in users who receive the incentive

Developing customer-centric loyalty programs based on user sentiments can help drive more engagement and genuine online branding.

This is one part of creating loyalty programs. Another part is updating your loyalty programs based on user preferences and events. This includes rewarding users upon consecutive purchases as Starbucks does.

You get a free tall drink on collecting 10 stars [which you earn through purchases]. Add to this, having rewards or discounts on birthdays is another trick in triggering positive sentiment in loyal users.

5 - Utilize Data Analytics for Sentiment Trends

Everything boils down to user data. Implementing a comprehensive sentiment scoring system and pitting it with user behavior can give you insights into behavioral trends.

Data analytics help combine emotions with business trends and extract insights that can help you position your brand better.

Setting up analytics for sentiment analysis has its benefits -

• You can input a sentence, and the tool can gauge its sentiment. It analyzes the user's intention behind the sentence and identifies whether it is an opinion, news, suggestion, query, appreciation, or complaint.
• Data analytics can help understand which aspect of your brand the user is discussing.

If you are an eCommerce brand, you would want to understand if your users are talking about late deliveries, failed payments, product quality, etc. Contextual semantic search can help identify and segregate conversations and measure the sentiments.

Implement data analytics and tie it with your sentiment analysis tool to adjust strategies based on data-driven insights and enhance the overall customer sentiment analysis.

6 - Implement Crisis Management Protocols for Negative Sentiment

Everything will not always be neutral or positive. You must also be prepared for negative sentiments and have proper crisis management guidelines.

When customers have a bad experience, they will connect it to how they feel about your brand. This is why identifying a crisis before it goes out of hand is an important part of sentiment analysis.

Negative sentiments will happen, and when that happens, do exactly what human nature demands - being heard, reassured, and valued.

Some essential tips to handle negative sentiments include:

• Prioritize the complaints or feedback that you can resolve faster. You will be in deep waters if you try to approach everyone simultaneously. Start by helping customers with issues requiring immediate attention or addressing issues affecting most users. You can do this by grading conversations in your sentiment analysis tool. Those with maximum negative grades are the red alert ones. A contact center software can help you analyze these conversations and maximize the efficiency of customer conversations.
• Fix what is broken and take a step extra to make your customers feel valued. Admitting to mistakes and reassuring your customers is the best way in such situations, especially if it has impacted many users. Go the extra mile, like offering a perk, retail discount, or anything that will add value to the customer, and see how negative sentiments turn positive.
• While responding to negative feedback, let your customers drive the conversation. Listen to what they were expecting earlier and what they want now. Share solutions that benefit them, and engage them with ideas to build a sense of community with your brand.

For instance, Versace, the Italian label, offended its users by making the factual mistake of designing t-shirts that implied Macau and Hong Kong were independent of China. This created a rage, which eventually calmed down with Donatella Versace's apology on Instagram.

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While these are the top strategies to leverage customer sentiment analysis, there are additional to-do's to keep in mind for better analysis.

Additional Pro Tips

Foster online community engagements

Consider building an online community for your users where they can help each other navigate through your products or services. You can use this community to launch beta versions of new features, discuss user benefits, listen to your customers, and gather genuine user feedback.

Implement training sessions for team sentiment awareness

Customer sentiment analysis is not just tool-bound. Your team must also understand and gauge customer sentiments while interacting with the users, whether on email, phone, instant messaging, or social media. Foster a culture that teaches your teams to prioritize customer feedback and improve sentiment analysis.

Integrate sentiment analysis in product development

Building a product is not only about solving a persistent pain point. It is also about modifying your roadmap to align with customer sentiments. Drive product enhancements and align new features that define customer needs acquired through sentiment analysis.

Celebrate customer success stories internally

Team motivation and support are important for everything to function smoothly. So, celebrate customer success milestones with your team and motivate them to keep learning, improving, and putting customers at the center of all decision-making.

Conclusion

There are multiple ways to leverage sentiment analysis. Know when to prioritize which sentiment and keep listening to your customers. The more you listen and enact, the more power sentiment analysis adds to your brand. Remember, being heard, communicated, reassured, and valued is human nature. Sentiment analysis will help you achieve that.