How To Measure Customer Sentiment and Why It’s Important (2024)

If a customer had a negative shopping experience with you, they would tell you. Right? 

Not always. Research shows only 16% of customers use social media to air their grievances, and only 22% write something on a third-party review site.

But just because the majority of customers aren’t publicizing their thoughts doesn’t mean you can’t learn how they feel about your brand. Through a customer sentiment analysis, you can uncover what your customers think about your company and get better insights into the effectiveness of your customer service team. 

What is customer sentiment?

Customer sentiment is a metric that captures your customers’ positive, negative, or neutral attitudes toward your brand and products. Customer sentiment can also include how your customers feel about your industry and competitors—even current events and trending topics. Improving overall customer sentiment for your brand can lead to more satisfied customers and long-term customer loyalty. 

You can track customer sentiment in various ways—through surveys and social listening tools, for example—to better understand how elements of your shopping experience influence customer attitudes. For example, a time-consuming checkout process can garner negative customer sentiment, while customer interactions with a knowledgeable, patient representative can result in positive customer sentiment.

Why measure customer sentiment?

Customer sentiment is a qualitative customer service metric that can be as powerful as sales data when it comes to boosting brand loyalty and overall satisfaction. Here’s why businesses gather, measure, and analyze customer sentiment: 

Improve the customer experience

Customer sentiment reveals where you’re excelling and where you can improve. For Gyve Safavi, cofounder of the toothbrush brand SURI, measuring customer sentiment was an opportunity to enhance its product offering, from font size to checkout. As Gyve describes on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast, all of those improvements come from customers describing their pain points.

Identify competitor strengths and weaknesses

Knowing why customers have a negative sentiment toward a competitor can reveal gaps in their strategy that you can aim to fill. On the other hand, learning why customers have a positive sentiment toward a competitor can illuminate where you might be lacking and provide a blueprint for exceeding expectations.

Tap into customer interests

When you gather customer sentiment data, you’re learning what your audience cares about and why. Use customer sentiment analytics as your North Star to discover what sparks passion in your customers and what would lead them to purchase.

5 ways to measure customer sentiment

1. Surveys
2. Social media listening
3. Messaging apps
4. Shopping customization
5. Customer sentiment scores

Getting a pulse on how customers feel about your brand might seem difficult since you can’t just read their minds. Luckily, there are several customer sentiment analysis tools and techniques at your disposal, including: 

1. Surveys

Some of the best customer data comes from customers themselves. Ask customers to fill out feedback forms or take customer satisfaction surveys to share their opinions with you. This is a common practice for gaining insights into customer service interactions. You can also use surveys to receive direct feedback on the quality of your support interactions, customer journey, and overall products and services.

Gyve used customer feedback surveys to measure customer sentiments on other electric toothbrush brands. “We realized there was a dominance of a few brands in the category, but nobody actually loved them,” he explains. “Half the time they couldn’t name [the brand],” he says. It identified a huge opportunity for the SURI team to develop both a better product and more effective brand messaging. 

2. Social media listening

Customers share their opinions, views, and feelings on social media platforms, and social listening tools allow you to keep tabs on all of them. With the help of social media monitoring tools, you can analyze the tone of customer comments that mention your brand, track the overall sentiment of online reviews, spot issues before they become major PR disasters, and address customer questions in a positive, constructive way that builds brand trust. Both positive and negative customer sentiments can open up new opportunities to build community and fix any weak spots in your customer experience. 

3. Messaging apps

Sometimes, gathering customer sentiment can come down to good, old-fashioned chats. Nadya Okamoto, founder of the period care company August, started out talking to her target audience members over Zoom calls and texting. “I was using iMessage and just literally texting people,” she says on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. This can give you an intimate look into how customers think and feel.

Messaging your customers is an invaluable form of direct feedback that can lead to actionable insights. Focus on messaging platforms relevant to your core customer demographics. If you’re a physical business, find city or local platforms where locals chat and share current events and tips. 

For online businesses, find the forums and comment sections where loyal customers live. And remember, this isn’t the place for marketing campaigns—customers don’t always want their personal online spaces or private chats overtaken by brand marketing. Instead, focus on listening, building relationships, and gathering customer opinions to use as data points. 

4. Shopping customization

As customers shop, there’s a huge opportunity to gather customer sentiment data about what they want and why. What they gravitate toward and add to their carts reveals a lot about their preferences and what they are willing to spend on a product—but so does what they aren’t adding to their cart and what they abandon. When you add customization to the mix, you can get a sense of what customer expectations are.

For example, Nadya uses a series of product customization options to let customers tell her exactly what they’re looking for in their subscription. “Consumers can come on and tell us exactly what they need, the assortment of tampons, pads, different sizes,” she explains. She can then use this information as a foundation for ideal customer profiles and future product offerings.

5. Customer sentiment scores

If you want a more quantitative approach to help you improve customer sentiment, use modern software that evaluates customer sentiment through customer sentiment analysis algorithms and natural language processing. 

Analyzing text, audio, and video of customers talking about their feelings toward a topic or brand, customer sentiment analysis tools assign a score on a scale of 100. For example, a 90% sentiment score is positive and 50% means it’s mostly negative. You can use this sentiment analysis score as a benchmark. So, when you implement a new checkout flow or more detailed protocols for your customer service team, you can check back in a few months after implementation to see if it improved your customer sentiment score.