How Can Sentiment Analysis Be Used To Improve Customer Experience in SaaS?

Wondering how you can leverage sentiment analysis to improve customer experience?

Customers are actively sharing their thoughts on social media and review sites, making these places valuable sources of customer feedback. To access this large pool of actionable data, you need to conduct sentiment analysis.

With sentiment analysis, you can discover essential customer insights, identify customer pain points, and modify your products and services accordingly.

If you’re ready to get started with customer sentiment analysis, then read on!

TL;DR

• Customer sentiment is how your customers feel about your products, services, and or your brand in general. These are the emotions that your brand evokes, and they can be positive, negative, or neutral.
• Sentiment analysis helps determine customer sentiment with accuracy. It involves using modern technology, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing, to understand the emotional undertone behind a body of text.
• Customer sentiment analysis is important as it allows you to collect direct customer feedback, monitor your brand’s reputation, find areas of improvement for your product, make data-driven decisions, and enhance the customer experience.
• Before you start to analyze customer sentiment, you need to gather and evaluate customer data correctly.
• The four ways you can do it include sending in-app microsurveys, checking reviews on product review platforms, running one-on-one user interviews with the Voice of the Customer (VoC) program, and actively monitoring social media channels.
• You can significantly enhance your customer experience using sentiment analysis. Here are five effective ways of doing so.

1. Use onboarding surveys to measure customer satisfaction, optimize it, and improve the initial stages of the customer journey.
2. Run Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys to identify where users are facing difficulties and reduce the time to value (TTV).
3. Conduct NPS surveys, analyze the responses, segment them, and follow up with detractors by offering personalized help and winning them back.
4. Act on the data collected through sentiment analysis and close the customer feedback loop by solving the problems.

• Userpilot is a comprehensive product growth platform that includes sentiment analysis tools, code-free.

What is customer sentiment in SaaS?

Customer sentiment is a key performance indicator (KPI) that reveals how customers feel about a brand, product, or service. It can be positive, negative, or neutral.

Unlike other quantitative KPIs, such as customer satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS), this is a qualitative metric.

What is sentiment analysis?

Sentiment analysis, often known as opinion mining, is a method of natural language processing (NLP) that determines the emotional undertone behind a text by using artificial intelligence and machine learning technology.

It allows you to identify customer emotions regarding a product or any of its aspects by going through any form of text, such as social media posts, online reviews, and news articles.

If customers typically use words such as “good”, “great”, and “amazing” to describe a certain product on a review site, it implies that the product is generally well received.

What’s the importance of customer sentiment analysis?

Here are five reasons why analyzing customer sentiment is important for your SaaS product.

Collect direct customer feedback

Sentiment analysis tools enable you to collect customer feedback directly from sources, such as social media posts, helping you understand how they feel about your product.

If you dive deeper into the social media comments, you’ll also be able to find out their most favorite and least favorite features.

Monitor brand reputation

Using sentiment analysis, you can understand how customers feel about your brand. This is also known as brand perception. It can help you answer questions like:

• Do customers find value in your brand’s products?
• Do they view your brand positively or negatively? Why so?

You can then take these into account and create more effective marketing campaigns, which can increase customer acquisition and user retention.

Find areas of improvement

When you analyze feedback, you can identify the friction points that block the customers from advancing with your product. Are users having difficulties using a certain feature? Are any features bugged? Or perhaps your team is not able to support customers properly?

Customer sentiment analysis enables you to find areas of improvement and change how customers feel about your product for the better.

Make data-driven decisions

Identifying pain points with accuracy is important and this is another way your product can benefit from sentiment analysis. It helps you make data-driven decisions and fix issues accordingly.

For example, if many customers complain about your customer service, then improving this becomes your priority.

Enhance customer experience

Your customer interactions, user engagement, and experiences with your brand directly impact your profits. SaaS products are thus focusing more and more on customer experience management to strengthen their relationships with users.

When customers feel like they’re being heard, they’ll find greater value in your product and stick with it for longer periods.

Collecting sentiment data, acting on it, and identifying customer friction points enhances the customer experience significantly, which in turn increases your product’s growth and revenue.

How to gather and evaluate data for customer sentiment analysis?

To make customer sentiment analysis work properly, you need to collect reliable customer data first. Here are 4 ways of doing it.

Sending in-app microsurveys

Microsurvey is a great way to track customer behavior. You can use them at various points throughout the customer journey to pinpoint how users feel at those specific moments.

For example, you can use CSAT (customer satisfaction) microsurveys after support tickets are resolved and ask, “How satisfied were you with this session?” or use NPS surveys to ask, “How likely are you to recommend our product to a friend or family member?”.

Here’s how Slack uses an NPS (Net Promoter Score) microsurvey to track customer sentiment:

Here’s a pro tip: when conducting short, quantitative surveys, it is extremely helpful to ask a follow-up qualitative question afterward. This allows users to explain their scores and provide you with actionable insights.

Userpilot has a wide variety of microsurveys, such as NPS, CES, CSAT, and product-market fit surveys. You need to only decide which survey you’d like to run, and it can be launched in seconds!

Checking reviews on product listing platforms

Actively monitoring popular SaaS product review sites, such as Capterra, G2, and Trustpilot is a great way to monitor customer attitudes.

Here, you can discover common customer problems, likes, and dislikes about your product through detailed reviews, like the one below.

Furthermore, these are great platforms to connect with your customers. You can reply to the individual reviews and acknowledge their problems. Being active on these platforms can improve your brand’s reputation.

Running user interviews

You can invite users for online one-on-one interviews through the Voice of the Customer (VoC) program and increase customer interaction with your brand.

Here, machine learning and natural language processing enable you to analyze customers’ voices to figure out the underlying tones in their speech, which can often be mistranslated by a support agent.

To increase their participation and encourage customer communication, you can provide incentives, such as coupons and discounts. With the VoC program, your customers will feel more valued as it is a direct way for them to voice their opinions.

Do social media listening

Currently, the social media population consists of more than 4 billion users, making it a very attractive platform to find your customers, monitor their activities, and engage with prospective users.

It is one of the largest communication channels that your customers use to ask questions, share opinions and experiences, and look for support. So, customer sentiment analysis will be incomplete without leveraging sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin. These platforms are overflowing with text content from both existing and potential customers.

Using sentiment analysis, you can evaluate these comments and posts and understand customers’ emotions in-depth. You can get valuable insights and see what the public thinks about your brand or product.

5 ways to use sentiment analysis to improve customer experience

Here are 5 ways you can apply customer sentiment analysis and deliver a better customer experience.

Use onboarding surveys to measure satisfaction and optimize it

Adding onboarding surveys to your customer sign-up flows can help you gain insights into customers’ needs. This can improve the product experience for users, resulting in higher activation and greater retention.

CSAT surveys are particularly useful in the onboarding phase. You can ask questions that allow you to gauge user sentiment, such as:

• How do you rate our product?
• How would you rate the support you have gotten so far?
• How satisfied were you with our service today?
• How easy was it to communicate with our company today?

This allows you to check whether or not the onboarding met their requirements and gives you a better understanding of how users feel at the start of their journey with your product.

Run CES surveys and shorten the time to value

Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys measure the effort required for customers to interact with your business. Here’s why you should use them:

• Find customer pain points and where they are struggling the most
• Evaluate experience across different touchpoints
• Fix any issues before users churn

When you remove these friction points, you help customers understand the value of your product faster, thus reducing the time to value and increasing product adoption rates.

Analyze NPS response tags to identify and remove friction points

With Userpilot, not only can you deploy ready-to-use NPS surveys, but you can also tag the responses to get valuable insights. In the image below, you can see the NPS scores across several categories.

You must act quickly to resolve these issues, especially with recurring complaints about the same aspects. Frequently occurring complaints can signal serious problems, so prioritize those issues and reach out to the users.

Follow up with detractors and offer personalized help

Detractors are users who would not recommend your products and services to other people. You should find them immediately using NPS surveys as they can damage your brand’s reputation through negative word-of-mouth.

With Userpilot, you can segment customers according to their survey responses. You can target them with personalized in-app messages that trigger after they complete the survey.

The segmentation is highly customizable. So they can be quite broad or very narrow. You could create one segment for all detractors or multiple segments within different NPS scores.

Once you find them, take immediate action to win them back and retain them. When you’re reaching out to them, make the attempt as personalized as possible. This allows you to identify the main reason for their low scores and offer tailored help.

Close the feedback loop and make customers updated

Let’s say you’ve collected customers’ feedback, paid close attention to what they’re saying, and interviewed them one-on-one. If you fail to act on it and don’t use your findings, it’ll all be useless.

To eliminate the negative emotions customers have regarding your brand, you need to take action. By doing so, you can close the feedback loop with customers and make sure you’re utilizing all of the feedback you’ve gathered as you work to improve your product.

Even if the results are disappointing, keep your customers informed. Establishing clear communication with your users is a good way to build trust and improve your brand reputation.

Conclusion

Sentiment analysis helps your brand to clearly understand how a customer feels about your brand and their experience with you. It offers you data from all over the internet to help you deliver an exceptional customer experience.

Using sentiment analysis, you reduce the likelihood of potential issues that can upset your customers and reach out before they churn. By using text-mining tools, you can capture emotional triggers and streamline your customer service to engage loyal customers.

Want to get create microsurveys code-free and conduct customer sentiment analysis? Get a Userpilot Demo and see how you can analyze customer feedback and provide delightful customer experiences with your product.