How to gather and evaluate customer sentiment

What is customer sentiment?

Customer sentiment is a measure of how customers feel and think about a brand based on their thoughts, emotions, opinions and attitudes. Positive customer sentiment contributes significantly to higher customer loyalty and continuous positive purchase behavior, while negative customer sentiment can have the opposite effect.

Sentiment can be both quantitative -- from customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys, for example -- and qualitative, such as comments on social media. Customer sentiment goes beyond keywords or purchasing behavior. It's a complex set of attitudes, feelings and thoughts that organizations can find on social media, derive from user behavior and solicit from direct interactions with the customer.

Customer sentiment can be positive (e.g., exceeding expectations regarding a delivery timeframe) or negative (e.g., not being able to speak with an agent in the contact center). Customers might or might not express their sentiment with specific words when interacting with an organization. Sentiment is more commonly displayed by emotions such as anger, frustration and happiness.

Sentiment can be a major driver of customer intent -- that is, whether they will make a purchase -- and urgency. However, the biggest opportunity it presents is for organizations to capture negative sentiment and act upon it.

The first step for gathering sentiment is knowing where and how to find it. There are both proactive and reactive ways to do so.

Gathering customer sentiment: Proactive methods

To gather customer sentiment proactively, an organization must reach out to the customer to collect feedback. It can do this in person or virtually, such as through surveys.

Survey tools enable organizations to ask customers directly how they feel about a particular transaction or about their products or services. A customer's emotional expression of satisfaction with a purchase provides valuable sentiment data.

Proactive ways to capture sentiment include the following.

Point of sale survey

Asking a question at a point of sale -- for example, a comment card at a restaurant -- captures the immediate outcome of a customer interaction.

Customer satisfaction survey

A CSAT survey, often performed immediately after a customer interaction, is a Likert scale measure -- for example, a 0-10 rating -- of customer experience. It gauges reception to product changes, a service's effectiveness, a campaign's success or another event where customer response matters. The score is simple to calculate, and businesses can add it to any CRM analytical process.

CSAT is most valuable for gathering general trends of key items. It also enables organizations to dive deeper into free-form comments and, possibly, follow-up conversations.

Customer effort score survey

The CES measures how much work a customer must perform on a specific task, such as buying a service, using a product, interacting with customer service, etc. The effort involved from the customer's perspective is another measure of satisfaction and a critical indicator in determining the future purchase potential for that customer.

Net promoter score

The NPS is another type of survey that identifies the likelihood that a respondent will recommend a company's products or services. This score is a strong measure of sentiment, as it reduces emotion into data for customer analytics.

NPS is frequently a back-end measure of customer loyalty taken from surveys, recommendation requests, customer interviews and service follow-ups. Like CSAT, it's a simple calculation that's easy to incorporate into any customer data collection process.

NPS is generally based on a Likert scale broken into three categories: promoters, who are very satisfied and loyal customers; passives, who might be loyal but are open to the competition; and detractors, who are unhappy customers who prefer other brands. NPS takes the percentage of promoters and subtracts the percentage of detractors.

Mystery shopping

Organizations can create an in-house program or hire an outside agency as mystery shoppers who act as customers and go through all the steps a normal customer performs, up to and including buying and using the product. The mystery shoppers then complete documentation, such as surveys.

Mystery shopping surveys can also include NPS ratings. However unconventional this technique might seem, it leads the pack in the resulting data quality. Information from mystery shoppers has high authenticity, broad utility and can help generate unanticipated insights.

In-person customer feedback

Asking customers directly is another effective method of gathering customer sentiment. The biggest risk with this method is the challenge of getting valid sample sizes.

Methods to gather in-person customer feedback include the following:

• Customer focus groups. Bringing together several customers in a structured focus group session helps gather feedback and dig deeper into specific comments made during the session. A downside is that customers might raise issues that are not widespread and only affect a specific individual or customer experience.
• User interviews. While more labor-intensive and time-consuming, individual user interviews enable an organization to focus on specific issues and dig deeply to fully understand the details. Often, a user interview provides an opportunity to follow up on a negative survey result.

Gathering customer sentiment: Reactive methods

Customers express their feelings about an organization in various ways, both solicited and unsolicited. In the past, customer service was the main way to capture this type of information. Now, with social media, there is a never-ending opportunity to reactively gather customer sentiment.

Reactive methods include the following.

Social media

Capturing feedback on social media can be rewarding but complex. Posts and conversations between customers on major social media channels -- Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. -- offer a fly-on-the-wall perspective on which products and services customers want and what they do or don't like. However, this methodology can snowball, as many customers can hop on a trend and add their input. Social media feedback might not provide the level of depth needed, but it can help organizations better understand an issue.

Likes

Less revealing than social media mentions and discussions, likes within apps such as Twitter and Instagram offer binary feedback on products, such as whether customers like or love a product. Despite being a thin measure, it's easily managed and provides a simple scale of measurement.

Online reviews

Product reviews are likes on steroids. They both reflect a thumbs-up for the brand and provide the why of the thumbs-up -- or, conversely, the thumbs-down. This method offers valuable detail and is increasingly easy to harvest. Consumers routinely turn to online review sites such as Yelp to see what others think. Even if a business can't work with such sites' unstructured data, star ratings are more useful than like counts. An average 4.2-star rating is worth more than knowing 62% of the people who visited the page liked the product.

Employee feedback

As a result of interacting daily with customers and working to resolve their issues, agents who respond to customer service inquiries have a wealth of knowledge of where pain points and opportunities for improvement exist.

Customer service interactions

Most negative feedback comes from service interactions across various channels, such as phone, email and chat. Customer issues and dissatisfaction flood these points of contact daily. Historically, data collection from direct customer interactions has been very poor, with the only actionable analytics traditionally being the "How satisfied were you?" question at the end of an interaction.

But there's more valuable data in these exchanges that was never analyzed. How intense was the customer's dissatisfaction? What was the customer's tone of voice? What is their history of contacts and complaints? All this information has great value, especially when aggregated with data from other customers.

To gather this data, major contact center and CRM platforms bundle contact center and social media listening software into their systems or use standalone products. Software can monitor communication channels for keywords and phrases, and the most important analytics are built in. Parsing through this data can be as simple or as complex as the tools allow, answering questions like "Is the product launch going well?" or "What don't they like about the interface?"

Organizations that are serious about sentiment analysis should obtain a tool suite that brings natural language processing and sophisticated data science together, going beyond keywords and brand mentions to extract mood, intentions and other subtleties.

Sentiment analysis tools listen to a verbal conversation or scan a body of text for emotional expression, then score the polarity of that expression. Did it lean positive? Negative? Neutral? These tools can go beyond scoring negative versus positive sentiment by detecting patterns and sometimes pinpointing specific emotions.

At its most advanced, customer sentiment analysis can analyze a verbal conversation or break text down to the level of identifying aspects of the product or service referenced and score each one. For example, "I love the product," followed by "The instructions that came with it are really complicated," combine positive and negative sentiments in a single review, but both pieces of information are valuable.

Customer behavior

Actual customer behavior provides another channel for collecting customer sentiment, and it often occurs at specific points in the customer journey. Three common ways to collect this information include the following:

• Web analytics. Analysis of customers' site visits should include the journeys they take and specific decisions they make on their journeys while visiting a website. Items to note include changes in volume of site visits, browsing times and abandoned carts.
• Purchase behavior. Analysis of customers' purchase behavior can show how customer sentiment drives what they buy and how often.
• Customer churn. Analysis of customers who have left an organization -- for example, lost cable subscribers -- can also represent customer sentiment, although it is often negative.

Tools for customer sentiment analysis

Each method of capturing customer sentiment has pros and cons, so organizations should use several of them and look for common points in the feedback.

There are many customer sentiment analysis tools available to organizations. Here are three common categories:

• Social listening tools. These tools monitor various social media platforms for relevant conversations regarding brand, service interactions, competitor mentions, etc.
• Customer support platforms. Support systems used by contact centers now have the ability to monitor interactions and perform sentiment analysis in real time and on a post-transaction basis.
• Feedback platforms. These platforms can be used as a repository of structured and unstructured data captured both proactively and reactively across various channels.

Regardless of the tool used to capture sentiment, organizations should step back and think about what customers say before acting too quickly. Examples include the following:

• When reviewing a group of media posts, was there a unique outside influence that may have driven customer sentiment to be positive or negative?

• When holding a focus group, did a customer service agent have a challenging experience with a customer earlier in the day that may have biased their comments?

How to act on customer sentiment

All this data plays a role in supporting business decisions, such as product development and service policy, but it's not enough to have the numbers and see how they trend. The data itself raises important questions, so businesses should analyze it and take appropriate action.

When a customer's rating or answer changes, businesses must understand why: What is the timing? Is there an upgrade or new release of a popular product or service? Did a competitor launch new features that are drawing customers away?

A customer's positive rating that turns negative affects the overall number indicating a product's popularity, but it's also a cue to reach out to the customer for more data to address problems and determine what the business can do differently.

Here are specific actions an organization should take regarding customer sentiment:

• Analyze and address the root cause of negative feedback.
• Share results of customer sentiment analysis across the organization.
• Celebrate positive feedback.

Additionally, organizations that use sentiment as the basis for action must view it in a broad context. While they should constantly monitor for important cues, they should also keep an analytical eye on the general trend of sentiment about the brand.

Monitoring whether the same customer praises a brand repeatedly in recommendations or on social media is also important, as the person could become a brand ambassador -- that is, a customer who can be incentivized to promote the brand to others.

Businesses can gather customer sentiment across numerous listening posts. When properly studied and interpreted, it can show the "why" of underlying customer behavior. This behavioral cue can signal to an organization what to do next to improve the customer experience and, in turn, drive customer loyalty and future purchase behavior.

Scott Robinson is an enterprise data architect at New Era Technology, a global digital transformation firm. He is an IT veteran with more than 25 years of experience, a social scientist and the author of Modern Data-Centric Architecture.

Scott Sachs is president and founder of SJS Solutions, a consultancy that specializes in contact center strategy assessments and technology selection.

Editor's note: This article was originally written by Scott Robinson and expanded by Scott Sachs in 2023 and 2026.