Customer review analysis vs Customer sentiment analysis
How would your brand evolve if you knew exactly how your audience felt about every feature and attribute of your products?
For consumer goods brands, customer reviews are often the most direct and plentiful source of customer feedback, providing a steady stream of invaluable information. Your customers are telling you (and everyone else) exactly what they want. If you know where to look.
In this article we are going to learn exactly how sentiment analysis takes customer review insights to the next level, and how your company can use it to get closer to your customers, increasing sales and creating lifelong loyalty along the way.
First, why should you care?
If you are a customer-driven consumer brand, this section is probably a no-brainer.
Customer feedback tells you exactly what your customers like and dislike about your products. By looking at customer reviews (and analyzing them for insights), you can make changes to your product description pages (PDP), marketing, and even physical changes to your product to better reflect exactly what the market wants.
The result? Happier customers. Not to mention better reviews, higher conversion rates, and more sales.
So what is customer review analysis?
Customer review analysis is the act of gathering useful information from customer reviews. All leading brands do it in some form, and it can include anything from manually pouring over customer reviews and picking a handful that seem to share a theme, to using a customer review analysis tool or software to pull these insights for you.
Often, these processes are incredibly manual, requiring mountains of effort to get even the most basic insights into what your customers want.
To combat this monumental task, software solutions have popped up that are supposed to make this process easier, but most suffer from a few common issues:
- Lack of data sources – (Many tools struggle to pull reviews from a variety of sources)
- Data requires manual cleaning to be useful – (Reviews are messy and complex, just like the people who write them)
- Lack of contextual awareness and nuance – (Language is tough. Meanings change in context.)
- Lack of insight depth – (It’s one thing for a tool to simply aggregate reviews and show that reviews are trending up or down, it’s another entirely to show exactly why with just a few clicks.)
- Bad reporting – (Insights are only useful when shared, and bad reporting and lack of integrations make many review analysis tools hard to use)
All these things add up to an obvious outcome. A software tool that isn’t used, or is only used to monitor simple things, with a whole lot of manual work thrown in on top to try and answer the hard questions.
So what is customer sentiment analysis?
Customer sentiment analysis is all about turning the feelings of people who use your product into data. It does everything that customer review analysis does, but it looks deeper, taking all the data into account and determining how every reviewer feels about each granular product feature and attribute.
This process gives another level of insights that customer review analysis tools simply can’t.
By looking at the sentiment in each review and aggregating this data, a sentiment analysis solution can highlight the net sentiment impact each product feature and attribute has, letting you quickly understand where customer expectations and reality aren’t matching up.
What type of customer insights can review sentiment analysis provide?
Review sentiment analysis is a line directly to an aggregate of your customer base. Here are a few examples of the type of insights you might discover:
- Stack rank issues by impact. Customer feedback is traditionally a qualitative data source. By using sentiment analysis, you can assign quantitative data to determine what product features or attributes are having the most impact on your product and use that to build a data-backed product roadmap.
- Break through complex feelings. Sometimes your customers disagree. Maybe a portion loves a product feature, and another portion doesn’t. By using sentiment analysis, you can see exactly how much of an impact the positive and negative sentiment is having, to help decide objectively whether that feature is working.
- Find mismatches between what customers like and what your brand likes talking about. Different copy on a PDP or in an ad campaign can make all the difference. By understanding objectively what customers like best about your product and aggregating their use cases, you can optimize your PDP and marketing to maximize conversions.
Review analysis vs Customer sentiment analysis: What is right for your brand?
Customer sentiment analysis defines exactly how consumers feel about granular product features and attributes, as opposed to just looking at review trends. But while it is much more powerful than review analysis, there are some brands it might not be a fit for. These include small businesses and companies that sell a small number of high ticket items.
Sentiment analysis creates a closer connection between your brand and consumers, creating marginal benefits for each shopper that engages with your products. If the number of shoppers or reviews are extremely low, you might not need the level of granular detail and automation that a tool like Yogi provides.
Where does Yogi fit in?
Yogi is the only sentiment analysis tool specifically designed for the consumer goods market. We provide unmatched shopper insights for some of the largest brands in the world including J&J, Microsoft, and Nestlé.
