What is Customer Sentiment (and Why Do You Need to Measure It)?

64% of consumers say they would stop doing business with a brand after only two or three bad experiences, according to our Customer Service Trends for 2021 report.

What if you knew what made an experience bad to avoid repeating it in the future? Customer sentiment is your answer to resolve hidden issues (and inefficiencies) that spiral out of control and hurt your brand.

As a customer service metric, customer sentiment digs deeper into the opinions of your customers. So it’s not only how they feel, but why they feel a certain way.

Let’s explore what customer sentiment is, why it’s important to your brand as a customer service metric to measure, and how you can easily track it.

What is Customer Sentiment?

Customer sentiment is a KPI indicating how customers feel toward your brand. It tells you if a customer’s overall emotions — based on engaging with your brand at a specific moment in the customer journey — were positive, negative, or neutral.

Bad experiences can’t be explained with a star rating alone — however, if you gather customer feedback comments, you’re closer than ever to understanding the ‘why’ behind issues.

To earn the data that customer sentiment is extracted from, you just need to ask the right questions in your surveys.

Customer feedback comments provide a microphone to customers to tell you what their experience was like and how they feel. It’s a much more dynamic type of survey response than a star rating, and customer sentiment isn’t any more difficult to measure as long as you’re analyzing customer feedback comments with the right solution.

Why You Need to Measure Customer Sentiment

KPIs such as CSAT, NPS, and CES are all critical to your brand’s success, but typically they’re quantitative customer service metrics. Customer sentiment, however, is a qualitative customer service metric.

It doesn’t materialize from star ratings nor present itself as a figure. Instead, it’s a customer service metric based on words. Yet customer sentiment is just as important as the other figured-based KPIs that your brand should be paying attention to today.

So, why do you need to measure customer sentiment? It allows you to understand why your customers feel the way they do and, most importantly, why they’re satisfied with or unsatisfied while interacting with your brand.

Customer sentiment is connected to nearly every other metric. If customers are unhappy with your brand and its service interactions, chances are CSAT is low. Well, don’t just sit there and play a guessing game. Use customer sentiment to find out why CSAT is low straight from the source: your customers!

In customer feedback comments, you’re able to observe the voice of the customer (VoC). Here, customers explicitly tell you what your brand did right and wrong to skew their sentiment positive, negative, or neutral.

Keep in mind that customer sentiment doesn’t necessarily speak for your brand as a whole. It can focus on a specific product, team, or person. Customers could say they love your brand, but they may not enjoy interacting with your service agents.

With this information you can improve your customer experience (CX) and coach better — agents who know the issues impacting customers frequently can prevent them from resurfacing, escalating, and then damaging your brand’s reputation.

Ultimately, the insights revealed by measuring customer sentiment drive decision-making.

Choose a Solution to Measure & Analyze Customer Feedback Automatically

Know how to analyze customer sentiment? It’s not easy to do yourself, especially since you’re likely receiving a large number of survey responses and customers may fill them with a sea of words. Customer sentiment is derived from qualitative data, and you need a solution to aggregate and analyze this data automatically.

Now you’re able to take advantage of Medallia Agent Connect and Text Analytics together in order to uncover the truth behind customer service feedback comments. Medallia Agent Connect captures real-time customer feedback comments in survey responses, and Medallia Text Analytics automatically analyzes every word to reveal key insights for you and your team to learn from.

Ready to ignite agent performance? Check out Medallia’s guide, 4 Steps to Supercharge Contact Center Agent Performance, to learn how leading contact centers are putting the right systems and processes in place to achieve success.