Customer Experience

What is Customer Sentiment and Why is it Important

What is Customer Sentiment and Why is it Important

What is Customer Sentiment

Customer sentiment is crucial for consumer package goods (CPG) companies looking to optimize the customer journey and better understand voice of customer. Customer sentiment analysis allows companies to analyze textual information to assess consumer reactions and opinions to craft an accurate vision of customers' feelings toward their brand. Customer sentiment is typically measured on a scale of positive, neutral, and negative sentiment.Customer sentiment analysis helps define the Voice of Customer to inform business decisions and improve retention rates. But what is customer sentiment, how does it differ from consumer sentiment, and why should your CPG enterprise care about customer sentiment analysis? This article will answer your questions about customer sentiment to optimize your customer journey.

Customer Sentiment Analysis

Before getting into how to use customer sentiment, it’s essential to understand what customer sentiment analysis entails. Customer sentiment analysis is crucial for CPG organizations because it helps companies process large amounts of textual information from customers to produce reporting on how customers actually feel about an aspect of a product or associated customer experience.Customer sentiment analysis gathers information and data from customer feedback and translates this data into a machine-readable format for tasks including predictive analytics and customer trends. This analysis collects data from sources such as online product reviews and other sources of customer feedback such as surveys and social media. Through this analysis, customer sentiment provides companies with thorough insights into how customers generally react to their products and services.

Why is Customer Sentiment Relevant?

Now that you know about customer sentiment, it’s time for the next important question: why is customer sentiment relevant to your business? The information collected from customer sentiment analysis is crucial to discovering key information about consumers and how brands can elicit positive responses from their customers.Positive customer sentiment is the backbone of a successful brand and can guide brands toward new methods to of appealing to existing and potential customers. Understanding customer sentiment enables brands to more quickly and efficiently identify important trends, shifts in sentiment, and potential changes they can make to keep customers loyal.By collecting data on customer sentiments, brands can avoid seeing various consumers flock to a competitor. Half of all consumers will switch to a competitive brand after a single poor customer experience. Without a thorough understanding of customer sentiment, brands are far more likely to lose consumers, revenue, and reliability.

What is Consumer Sentiment?

While the terms sound similar, there are critical differences between customer and consumer sentiment. Therefore, it’s essential to ask: what is consumer sentiment? Consumer sentiment describes a measurement of the economy at large, determined by an overall look at consumer opinions. Consumer sentiment accounts for how consumers feel regarding their financial health, short-term economic health, and long-term possibilities for economic growth.Consumer sentiment became relevant to public economics in the mid-20th century and is currently a barometer influencing economic policies. Consumer sentiment serves numerous purposes in understanding economic policies and trends.For instance, economies use consumer sentiment to measure how optimistic consumers are toward their current finances and the state of their economy. Economies use the Consumer Confidence Index and Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index to measure consumer sentiment.

The Difference Between Customer Sentiment and Consumer Sentiment

Consumers often use customer and consumer sentiment interchangeably because of their similar approaches to analyzing consumer spending and behaviors. However, there are critical differences between customer sentiment and consumer sentiment that you should consider when analyzing patterns of consumer behaviors within your company.Customer sentiment analyzes specific consumer habits within a given brand or industry by measuring how customers feel toward individual products, brands, and services. It analyzes positive, neutral, and negative attitudes toward a brand or product to identify areas for growth or improvement. Individual brands typically perform customer sentiment analysis to develop future strategies to improve customer satisfaction and retention.On the other hand, consumer sentiment covers a broader perspective on consumer behavior. Unlike customer sentiment, consumer sentiment provides a general overview of how consumers feel about the economy and their economic situation without going into their feelings about specific brands.While customer sentiment analysis is essential for identifying the behaviors of your company’s customers, consumer sentiment analysis is essential for understanding the market and supply chain overall. Consumers are the reason behind supply chain demand, and consumer sentiment trends will heavily influence your brand, industry, and offerings.Even if changes in consumer sentiment do not directly affect your customer behaviors, your business is indirectly affected by changes in consumer sentiment. One way consumer sentiment analysis benefits the supply chain, and the market is by allowing manufacturers to make wise investment decisions.Consumer sentiment analysis massively benefits financial institutions, with many relying on consumer sentiment to understand cash flows, loan demands, investments, and interest rates. Consumer sentiment analysis is how financial institutions determine strategies for maximizing cash flows and lowering potential risks.

Customer Sentiment as a Source for Voice of Customer

Customer sentiment contributes to a company’s overall understanding of the voice of the customer. Voice of Customer (VOC) is a term that describes the customers feedback including their likes, dislikes, and preferences and is used for making consumer-centric business decisions. Customer sentiment helps organizations identify the VOC and create strategies catering to customer preferences.Customer sentiment analysis is a leading method for measuring and quantifying the voice of the customer for many organizations. Like customer sentiment analysis, the data sources for measuring VOC include various feedback sources such as digital interactions, external sources, social media, and online product reviews. Utilizing this data enables brands to ensure each business decision is backed up by the preferences and requests of real customers.Customer sentiment and VOC analysis also make it easier for brands to improve customer support and other important aspects of the customer experience. For example, negative trends in customer sentiment and VOC help companies prioritize areas of improvement and product development roadmaps.

Customer Sentiment Helps Optimize the Customer Journey

Customer sentiment is valuable to individual brands because it helps optimize the customer journey. Customer sentiment analysis is essential to understanding trends in negative customer responses, monitoring brand reputation, and identifying areas to improve and enhance marketing messaging and campaigns.The following are some top ways customer sentiment analysis can optimize marketing efforts and customer journey.

  • Analyzing the general sentiment toward new products or features
  • Tracking competitors for their new products and releases
  • Tracking market shifts
  • Competitive analysis and benchmarking
  • Analyzing segmented customer behaviors
  • Adjusting campaigns, messaging, and product claims

Additional Benefits of Customer Sentiment

Customer sentiment goes beyond optimizing marketing strategies and offers various additional benefits to help brands thrive and encourage customer satisfaction. Below are additional use cases and common best practices for utilizing customer sentiment analysis.

  • Customer sentiment analysis can identify areas for improvement in customer service.
  • Positive customer sentiments help quantify return on investment.
  • Sentiment analysis allows you to identify new opportunities for product development.
  • Customer sentiment analysis helps you identify what strategies you should prioritize to improve overall customer satisfaction.
  • Sentiment analysis helps you measure your and your competitors brand reputation.
  • Thorough analysis helps identify triggers that influence customer behavior.
  • Provides real-time updates and feedback to optimize PDP claims.
  • Customer sentiment analysis can identify areas to improve communication with customers.

Why You Should Use a Sentiment Analysis Tool

Customer Sentiment analysis tools are crucial for helping CPG’s improve overall customer experiences and delivering high-quality products. Customer sentiment analysis is the most accurate and efficient way to generate actionable insights from customer feedback.Instead of guessing the wants and needs of your customers, you can use sentiment analysis to make changes that work.

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