What is Customer Sentiment Score & How to Measure It?
The customer sentiment score can help you tell how well-perceived your brand is.
But how can you measure and improve it?
Let’s explore the customer sentiment score, how to measure it with user feedback, and what strategies you can execute to elevate the customer experience.
TL;DR
- Customer sentiment refers to customers’ emotions and attitudes towards your brand, providing insights into their satisfaction levels.
- The customer sentiment score quantifies customers’ emotions and attitudes towards your brand, ranging from 0 to 100.
- A good sentiment score varies by industry. Higher scores indicate more positive customer feelings and benchmarks differing across sectors (in SaaS being 40).
- Measuring customer sentiment helps understand customer needs, enhance customer experience, boost retention, reduce churn guide business strategy, and monitor brand health.
- Here are the steps to perform a customer sentiment analysis:
- Invest in sentiment analysis tools to gather and analyze feedback accurately with features like real-time analysis and multi-source integration.
- Collect customer feedback through in-app surveys like NPS, CSAT, and CES surveys to capture timely and relevant insights.
- Analyze survey responses to identify common themes and sentiments, uncovering specific issues and areas of satisfaction.
- Assign positive and negative scores to responses to calculate the overall customer sentiment score and track changes over time.
- Combine sentiment scores with other data points to gain a holistic view of the customer experience (and create a customer-centric experience).
- Let’s go over some strategies to improve your customer sentiment score:
- Improve customer experience based on feedback insights, prioritizing areas of dissatisfaction to enhance customer satisfaction.
- Track customer sentiment score to measure the effectiveness of product strategies and identify areas for improvement.
- Proactively engage with customers through direct interactions, personalized emails, and loyalty programs to improve satisfaction.
- Personalize customer interactions by segmenting the user base and tailoring communications, offers, and support to individual preferences.
- Userpilot can help you to: collect feedback for customer sentiment analytics, analyze customer profiles, access the NPS dashboard, and create customized in-app flows to improve customer sentiment.
- You’ll need a platform to do this. Why not book a Userpilot demo to see how you can gather feedback, calculate your score, and increase it?
Try Userpilot and Take Your Customer Experience to the Next Level
What is customer sentiment?
Customer sentiment refers to customers’ emotions and attitudes towards your brand, product, or service. It touches on their overall feelings—whether positive, negative, or neutral—and provides insights into their satisfaction and loyalty levels.
It goes beyond surface-level feedback and it involves analyzing feedback from various sources (such as social media, customer reviews, surveys, and direct interactions). This way, you can identify areas of improvement and enhance the product experience to meet customer needs more effectively.
What is the customer sentiment score?
The customer sentiment score is a quantitative metric that measures customers’ emotions and attitudes toward your brand, product, or service.
It ranges from 0 to 100, and it’s calculated by subtracting the percentage of negative responses (detractors) to the percentage of positive responses (promoters).
What is a good sentiment score?
A good sentiment score can vary widely depending on the industry and specific benchmarks. Generally, a higher sentiment score indicates a more positive overall customer feeling.
But what’s considered “good” can differ from one sector to another. For example, according to Retently’s 2024 NPS benchmark, here’s the average sentiment score for each industry:
- Insurance: 80
- Consulting: 76
- Financial Services: 73
- Technology & Services: 61
- Ecommerce: 52
- Retail: 64
- Digital Marketing Agencies: 59
- B2B Software & SaaS: 40
- Logistics & Transportation: 40
- Construction: 37
- Cloud & Hosting: 39
- Internet Software & Services: 16.
That said, a score between 0-30 can be pretty regular (with room for improvement). Higher than that, and your business is doing a good job at keeping generating promoters (more than 70 is excellent and translates into massive word-of-mouth results).
Why is it crucial to measure customer sentiment?
Measuring and analyzing customer sentiment helps you stay aligned with your customer’s expectations and make improvements to enhance their overall experience.
Not only that, staying on track with your customer sentiment is essential for several other reasons too, including:
- Understand Customer Needs: You can gain insights into what your customers value most and what pain points they experience—and provide a better service.
- Enhance Customer Experience: You can identify areas where your service excels and areas that need improvement, leading to more satisfied and loyal customers.
- Boost Customer Retention: Customers who feel positively about your brand are more likely to stay loyal and continue using your products or services.
- Guide Business Strategy: Customer sentiment data provides actionable insights that can guide customer success, marketing, product development, customer service, and even sales.
- Monitor Brand Health: Keeping a pulse on customer sentiment helps you understand how your brand is perceived in the market and its reputation.
How to perform customer sentiment analysis?
Performing customer sentiment analysis involves several steps, from collecting feedback to deriving actionable insights.
Let’s go over each of them:
Invest in sentiment analysis tools
First, you’ll need the right software to gather and analyze feedback. Sentiment analysis tools are designed to interpret and categorize customer feedback accurately—and provide actionable feedback.
A good tool should include:
- Real-time analysis so you can stay up-to-date with the latest data at any time.
- Integration with multiple feedback sources (such as social media, NPS surveys, and reviews).
- Survey builder so you can create, customize, and trigger sentiment surveys like NPS, CSAT, and CES.
- Detailed reporting capabilities where you can track changes over time and predict future trends based on customer data.
Collect customer feedback
Now, you can start gathering feedback.
For this, in-app surveys are an effective way to capture user feedback in real-time, directly within your app. These surveys can be triggered at strategic points in the user journey, ensuring that you capture relevant and timely feedback.
Some of these include:
- NPS surveys. It asks customers how likely they are to recommend your product or service to others on a scale of 0 to 10. Great for measuring customer loyalty and differentiate between promoters, passives, and detractors.
- CSAT surveys. Ask users how satisfied they are with your product, a feature, support, etc.
- CES surveys. It measures how much effort it takes to use your product.
Pro tip: Follow up these surveys with an open-ended question so users can provide more details behind their answers.
Analyze survey responses
Once you’ve collected feedback, it’s time to visualize the data to identify common words and sentiments among user responses.
Your sentiment analysis tool of choice will show you how many responses you got, what answers were chosen (and their percentage), and the individual answers to the open-ended questions.
Here, dive deeper into the responses to uncover specific issues, praises, and suggestions. Look for recurring themes and patterns that can highlight common pain points or areas of satisfaction.
The goal is to reveal the underlying causes of customer sentiment, enabling you to address root issues effectively.
Give positive and negative scores to responses
Now, to calculate the customer sentiment score, you need to assign a sentiment to each response.
In general, positive feedback receives the highest scores, negative sentiments receive a low score, and neutral sentiment falls in between. For example, for NPS surveys, promoters respond with a score of 9-10, detractors with a score of 1-5, and neutrals between 6 and 8.
This scoring process can be done manually or automated using sentiment analysis tools that assign scores based on the detected sentiment. The result will be your customer sentiment score, making it easier to track changes and trends over time.
This way, you can get a snapshot of customer sentiment at a given time. And as a result, assess the effectiveness of your product strategies.
Gather customer sentiment insights
Combining sentiment scores with other data points provides a holistic view of the customer experience.
For example, pairing sentiment analysis data with customer demographics, purchase history, and usage patterns can reveal deeper insights into how your product resonates with different customer segments—and decide how to make your product appeal to those audiences.
This way, if sentiment analysis reveals dissatisfaction with a particular feature, you can prioritize improvements in that area. If other aspects of your product get positive customer sentiment, leverage these strengths in your marketing and customer engagement efforts.
As a result, you can create a more customer-centric approach that leads to a bigger community of loyal customers.
How to improve customer sentiment score
Now, let’s look at four key strategies to improve customer sentiment score:
Improve customer experience based on the insights from customer feedback
A high customer sentiment score is often linked to a smooth customer experience.
That said, you can use CSAT or CES surveys to identify areas where customers have expressed dissatisfaction and prioritize addressing these issues to enhance the customer experience.
This data can also be used as a qualitative customer service metric. For example, if customers frequently mention slow response times from customer support, invest in training and expanding your support team to ensure quicker and more efficient responses.
Regularly measure customer sentiment score
Regularly tracking customer sentiment scores is crucial for tracking the effect of your product strategies and identifying more areas for improvement.
For this, make sure to send surveys frequently and perform sentiment analysis every quarter as you implement different strategies.
The best moments to do this can be after major product updates, during key business milestones, or following significant marketing campaigns.
As a result, you’ll be able to gauge the immediate impact of your actions and adjust strategies accordingly.
Proactively engage with customers to improve customer satisfaction
One way to improve sentiment scores is to get yourself out there and engage more with customers.
This can mean reaching out to customers directly to gather feedback, address specific concerns, and show appreciation for their loyalty. You can also send personalized emails, follow up with surveys, and provide direct customer support to make customers feel valued and heard.
For example, you can implement a loyalty program that rewards (e.g. discounts, early access, exclusive content) customers for providing feedback, engaging with your product, and bringing referrals. This way, you can provide value to your user base and improve their sentiment toward your brand.
Personalize customer interactions
According to a McKinsey study, 76 to 78% of consumers are more likely to purchase, recommend, and make repeat purchases from companies that personalize the customer experience (i.e. better customer sentiment).
The best way to personalize CX is by segmenting your user base and designing communications, offers, and support experiences to individual preferences and behaviors.
For instance, you can personalize email campaigns by addressing customers by their names and recommending products based on their past purchases. This level of personalization makes customers feel recognized and appreciated, leading to more positive sentiments.
Tracking and improving customer sentiment score with Userpilot
Userpilot offers a comprehensive suite of tools designed to help you track and improve your customer sentiment score.
Here’s how you can leverage Userpilot’s features to enhance customer satisfaction:
- Collect feedback by creating and triggering in-app surveys inside your app, such as NPS surveys, CES surveys, and CSAT surveys. These can be triggered automatically so you can collect feedback on your sleep.
- Analyze customer’s profiles to check their survey responses and track their sentiment. This way, you can identify patterns or trends from different customer segments.
- Get access to an NPS dashboard where you can watch metrics like NPS, response rates, and the distribution of promoters, passives, and detractors. You can also filter results by different segments to get deeper insights.
- Create customized in-app flows and onboarding experiences based on customer feedback and sentiment analysis. Including built-in tracking features to watch over the performance of tooltips, checklists, and so on.
Conclusion
Understanding and improving your customer sentiment score can lead to enhanced customer satisfaction, boost customer loyalty, and drive long-term growth.
By taking the time to regularly measure and act on customer sentiment data, you’ll be able to stay aligned with your customer’s needs and expectations.
Since you’ll need a platform to do this, why not book a Userpilot demo to see how you can gather feedback, calculate your score, and increase it?
Try Userpilot and Take Your Product Growth to the Next Level
