Customer sentiment. It’s not just a buzzword, we promise. Customer sentiment is at the heart of understanding, measuring, and improving the relationships you have with your customers. It is the emotion behind customer engagement.
Knowing how mobile customers feel about your app helps you gain insights that boost engagement, retention, and revenue growth.
Below are the keys to gauging, analyzing, and leveraging sentiment data to fully unlock its value.
What is Customer Sentiment?
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 to angry. No matter where your customers fall on the sentiment spectrum, it’s imperative you understand not only their emotional state, but what drives it as well.
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 is no longer a huge gap between brands and consumers. Consequentially, the way in which brands make customers feel through their experiences and products matters more now than ever.
Why is Customer Sentiment so Important?
When it comes down to it, customer sentiment is critical because relationships are the foundation for everything we do. In personal and business life, a strong, mutually beneficial relationship sets the tone for all future interactions.
Additionally, 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 continue using your product, even when competitors come calling? Will they recommend you to a friend?
Engagement intent: How likely are customers to engage again in a day/week/month?
How to Measure Customer Sentiment
It can be overwhelming to think about all of the ways in which you can measure customer sentiment. Instead of trying to master every single channel, we recommend focusing on wherever your most valuable customers spend the most time (hint: this is most likely your mobile app!).
At Alchemer, our digital capabilities help product managers, marketers and CX-leaders engage with their customers through mobile apps and websites. We empower our customers to connect, understand, and respond to the sentiments and preferences of their own customers.
Here are some Alchemer Digital features that help you measure customer sentiment within your customer’s digital experience:
In-App Surveys
There’s a reason why surveys are so popular: Companies can quickly collect and analyze both quantitative and qualitative feedback from customers. Mobile surveys are also powerful in understanding customer sentiment. With precise targeting capabilities these surveys reach customers at the heart of their digital experience, offering real-time insights into their sentiments, preferences, and satisfaction levels. When it comes to mobile, short surveys with specific questions (like feedback on a new feature) are effective and efficient.
The Love Dialog
The Love Dialog is a unique way to gauge customer emotion in the moment. This prompt helps you understand how customers feel about your app by asking a simple question: “Do you love our company?” The answer to this question can then help you understand where people fall in terms of sentiment.
If customers don’t express satisfaction for your app and answer “No” to the Love Dialog, you have an opportunity to gain valuable feedback on the issues encountered, mitigate any problems, and turn the experience into something they DO love.
Ratings and Reviews
Customer reviews track sentiment, and in-app ratings prompts inspire customers to leave their thoughts on your mobile experience. App reviews provide you with feedback and insight; they also serve as a marketing promotion tool. Intelligently placing rating prompts at the right times throughout your app is crucial for understanding customer sentiment.
How to Analyze Customer Sentiment
After collecting raw sentiment data through surveys, app ratings, and a tool like the Love Dialog, brands need to the ability to dive deeper and understand the “why” behind these feelings and emotions.
Digital Insights and Fan Signals are two ways Alchemer empowers brands to analyze sentiment data with precision and granularity, providing actionable insights into the factors driving customer sentiment.
Alchemer Digital Insights
Alchemer Digital Insights allows you to dig into open-ended feedback received across ratings and reviews, Message Center messages, and open text survey responses.
Insights uses machine learning to rank significant phrases in feedback, visualizing how your customers feel. This tool helps explain the why behind the raw feedback customers provide. Insights uses machine learning to identify and assign positive, neutral, or negative sentiment for each piece of feedback received.
Fan Signals
Fan Signals are a collection of Alchemer Digital features that help you capture, analyze, and act on the feelings of your consumers, building critical emotion data over time. These signals enable emotion-based customer segmentation to predict churn, boost revenue, and retain customers throughout their mobile journey. Recurring Love Dialog interactions derive Fan Signals, characterizing consumers as either a Fan or Risk.
As you capture data from the Love Dialog, Alchemer Digital automatically segments your customers into one of several Fan Signals groups, based on their Love Dialog responses across the span of time.
Over time and across customer journeys, signals are qualified as either:
- New Fan or Risk (expressed for the first time)
- Repeat Fan or Risk (expressed sequentially)
- Shifted Fan or Risk (from one state to another)
Acting on Customer Sentiment
Customer sentiment data can impact many different areas of business. Although, we see most brands using this information to inform product decisions as well as marketing campaigns. However, it can also help with other functions from market research to brand reputation and more. Here are some examples of how brands have used Alchemer to act on customer sentiment:
Identifying and Utilizing your Fans
When you are able to identify people who love your brand, you can then retarget them to encourage desired behavior. Encourage customers to share your app via referral links or sign up for your loyalty program. Or you could send them to social media and encourage them to share their positive experience with followers.
Activating and nurturing loyal customers is critical to building a successful organization. This is because 65% of a company’s business comes from existing customers, and it costs five times as much to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one satisfied (Gartner).
Prioritize your Product Roadmap
What good is feedback if you don’t use it to make data-driven product decisions? By listening deeply to customer sentiment and asking the right questions at the right places and times within your mobile customer experience, you can prioritize items on your roadmap that will have the biggest impact on your brand’s biggest fans. What can that look like in practice?
- Speed up the development process and cut out the guess work by testing out new ideas or features before committing significant development resources.
- If you have your finger on the pulse of customer sentiment, you can quickly identify bugs or usability issues, and then prioritize fixes based on the frequency and severity of reported issues.
- Listening to customer feedback and tracking sentiment helps you uncover new opportunities for product features or enhancements that you might not otherwise have considered.
Ready to Get Started?
Whether it’s identifying and nurturing your brand advocates, refining your product offerings, or resolving concerns promptly, harnessing mobile customer sentiment empowers you to cultivate stronger relationships with your audience and drive positive business outcomes.
So, are you ready to harness the power of mobile customer sentiment to elevate your business? Request a demo today!
Discussion about this post