4 Ways to Conduct a Customer Sentiment Analysis

4 min read

It’s essential to frequently monitor how users feel about your product and address any concerns they may have about your app early.

Frank L.
Frank L.
Published July 1, 2022

If users feel dissatisfied or have bad experiences with your product for too long without checking in with how the user is doing, they’ll leave before you can make the improvements they want.

In fact, according to research by Zendesk, 76% of customers are willing to switch to a competitor after “multiple bad customer service experiences” with a company. Customer sentiment analysis helps identify when customers experience dissatisfaction with your product early on, so you can fix those bad experiences before it becomes too much for the user.

Customer sentiment analysis is an essential part of managing an app or SaaS product because it helps you monitor your customers' satisfaction and identify areas for improvement. Here are the four best ways to run customer sentiment analysis and better understand users.

1. Gather Feedback Through Pop-up Chats

Chat messaging is a straightforward way to ask users how they feel about your company without needing to hire more people. It’s all thanks to chatbots, which is software that has conversations with users (in place of a customer support agent). Chat messaging is also a direct way of collecting feedback from users.

Chat messages come in the form of pop-ups that ask your customer to complete a survey on their app experience. Customers can also reach out to you directly via a chatbot with any feedback they have about your product.

Since chatbots keep all your customer interactions in one place, you can review them at any time to get an idea of common user requests or complaints.

Integrate chat messaging as part of your app or SaaS platform with Stream’s Chat APIs. You should program the chatbot using the APIs to reach out to the user directly when they enter your app or after they’ve spent a bit of time with it. In each conversation, you could also ask them to rate the quality of your service in order to better judge how well you manage customer requests.

2. Conduct Customer Interviews

Customer interviews allow you to speak to users directly to better understand their needs and general satisfaction. You can conduct customer interviews remotely or in person. Based on the feedback from the customer interviews, you’ll have an idea of what to do to improve your product.

During customer interviews, you must prepare yourself for both positive and negative feedback. Positive feedback will tell you which features to really highlight. If your customers really like a particular flow, you can focus a marketing campaign on it to drive new business.

Alternatively, negative feedback tells you where you need to invest more time and resources. Your team needs to focus on fixing the problems customers point out before they get worse.

3. Send Net Promoter Score (NPS) Surveys

An NPS survey allows a user to rate how likely they are to recommend your product to others using a scale of 1 to 10. The Net Promoter Score is a good indicator of your customer’s general satisfaction and helps identify your most loyal customers.

There are three categories your customer could fall under, depending on the score they give you:

  • Score 9 to 10: Customers who provide a score of 9 to 10 are your “promoters.” These are your most loyal users who will return to your product and become your brand advocates.
  • Score 7 to 8: These are your “passive” customers. Passive customers may feel satisfied with your product, but their score isn’t high enough to consider them brand advocates. They may also be tempted by what the competition is offering.
  • Score 0 to 6: Customers in this score range are your “detractors.” They’re likely unhappy with your product and are the least likely to spread the good word about your company to others.

You can send the survey through email or in-app via your chatbot. Make sure to send your NPS survey at the right time. For example, the perfect time to ask customers to provide their NPS score is right after they finish their user onboarding since, at this point, they’ve had enough time to explore your product.

4. Monitor Social Media and Online Reviews

Monitor what your customers say on social media and in reviews, both on your site and others’. Most potential customers read reviews before they buy, and they trust what they see on social media. They often buy (or don’t buy) based on what they read in those places. In fact, over 75% of customers will read up to six customer reviews before they purchase a product.

Here’s a list of tools you can use to monitor what customers are saying about your product online:

  • Mention: Mention is a social listening tool that allows you to track what people are saying online about your company, including on review sites, forums, press releases, or social media apps. The tool even sends you a notification whenever a website mentions your company.
  • Brandwatch: Brandwatch goes through millions of posts and online conversations to keep track of what customers say about your company. Its advanced AI segmentation features help you group your conversations into different categories, such as complaints and opinions.
  • Pulsar Platform: Pulsar tracks online conversations about your company from various channels such as social media, search, and forums, all in one place. You can then divide your data by audience demographics and behaviors.

Customer Sentiment Analysis Helps Build a Better Product

It's not enough to understand how to conduct a customer service analysis. You need the right tools to ensure your process is smooth, and your data is accurate.

If you need features within your product to better collect user feedback, Stream has you covered. Our third-party APIs help you integrate activity feeds and chat messaging into your app to engage users. Start a free trial today to learn more.

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