How To Be Buzzworthy: Proactive Strategies To Boost Customer Sentiment

Customer sentiment.

How customers feel about your products and brand is more important than ever. 65% of customers say a positive brand experience is more influential than great advertising, and 42% would pay more for a better experience, according to PwC.

Your first goal should be to never get caught off guard, as Polaroid was, by sweeping changes in consumer behavior. By tracking customer sentiment toward your products and brand, you’ll stay on top of rising and falling sentiment.

Fortunately, you’re not at the whim of fate here. You can positively impact customer sentiment by listening to customers and giving them what they need. Commit to shaping your company around what customers ask for, and you’ll naturally become a brand that customers love.

Ready for practical customer sentiment-boosting tips? Read on.

What is Customer Sentiment?

Customer sentiment refers to how customers feel about a brand, product, or service based on their experiences and interactions. It can be positive, negative, or neutral and is often measured through reviews, social media comments, surveys, and customer feedback.

Businesses analyze customer sentiment to understand satisfaction levels, identify issues, and improve their offerings. Sentiment analysis tools use AI and natural language processing to detect emotions in text, helping companies make data-driven decisions to enhance customer experience and loyalty.

Your Customer Sentiment Score

Customer Sentiment Score (CSS) is a metric that quantifies customer emotions toward a brand, product, or service based on their feedback. It is derived using sentiment analysis tools that process customer interactions from sources like reviews, social media, surveys, and support tickets.

Example:

Let’s say a company collects customer feedback from product reviews and social media comments. Their sentiment analysis tool processes 1,000 feedback entries and classifies them as follows:

• 600 positive comments
• 250 neutral comments
• 150 negative comments

Using a common formula:CSS=(Positive−Negative)Total×100CSS = \frac{(Positive - Negative)}{Total} \times 100CSS=Total(Positive−Negative)​×100 CSS=(600−150)1000×100=4501000×100=45CSS = \frac{(600 - 150)}{1000} \times 100 = \frac{450}{1000} \times 100 = 45CSS=1000(600−150)​×100=1000450​×100=45

What this means:

A CSS of 45 indicates that customer sentiment is mostly positive, but there are still some negative opinions that need attention. Businesses can track this score over time to measure improvements or declines in customer satisfaction.

How Do You Measure Customer Sentiment?

Measuring customer sentiment involves gathering and analyzing feedback to understand how customers feel about a product, service, or brand. Here are some common ways to do it:

1. Surveys & Polls: Ask customers directly using rating scales (e.g., Net Promoter Score, CSAT) or open-ended questions.
2. Social Media Monitoring: Track mentions, comments, and reactions on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
3. Online Reviews & Ratings: Analyze reviews on sites like Google, Yelp, and Trustpilot to see common themes in feedback.
4. Sentiment Analysis Tools: Use AI-driven tools to scan text from emails, chats, and social media for positive, negative, or neutral sentiment.
5. Customer Support Interactions: Examine chat logs, call transcripts, and email responses to detect satisfaction levels.
6. Website & App Analytics: Track user behavior, like bounce rates and time spent on pages, to gauge engagement and frustration.
7. Competitor Benchmarking: Compare sentiment trends against competitors to understand market perception.

Cutomer Sentiment Analysis Tools

Before you improve customer sentiment, you need to do some in-depth customer sentiment analysis to learn where you stand. Here are some software solutions I recommend:

1. 1. Sprig — Best for collecting and analyzing sentiment data at scale
2. 2. Fullstory — Best for identifying frustration signals
3. 3. Brand24 — Best all-in-one sentiment analysis & brand protection tool
4. 4. Diffbot — Best for its automated sentiment research capabilities
5. 5. Podium — Best for engaging customers through text messages.
6. 6. Qualaroo — Best for its IBM powered sentiment analysis
7. 7. Nextiva — Best for AI-powered customer sentiment analysis
8. 8. Sociality.io — Best for teams looking for a comprehensive solution to manage their social media channels
9. 9. UDESK — Best for omnichannel information analysis
10. 10. Lexalytics — Best sentiment analytics tool for high-volume text processing

Show More (5)

Key Features of Sentiment Analytics Software

Selecting the right sentiment analysis software depends on your business needs, data sources, and goals. The best tools should offer accurate sentiment detection, real-time monitoring, and actionable insights to help you improve customer experience and brand reputation. Here are some key features to watch out for:

• Text Analysis: Scans customer feedback (reviews, social media, emails, etc.) to identify emotional tone.
• Sentiment Classification: Categorizes feedback as positive, neutral, or negative using AI and natural language processing (NLP).
• Emotion Detection: Goes beyond polarity to detect emotions like joy, anger, frustration, or excitement.
• Real-Time Monitoring: Continuously tracks brand mentions and customer feedback across various platforms.
• Customizable Sentiment Scoring: Assigns numerical scores to sentiment for easier trend analysis.
• Competitor Analysis: Compares customer sentiment toward your brand versus competitors.
• Multi-Channel Integration: Pulls data from social media, chatbots, emails, surveys, and more.
• Automated Reports & Insights: Provides dashboards and reports with sentiment trends and actionable insights.
• Keyword & Topic Analysis: Identifies common themes in customer feedback to highlight strengths and weaknesses.
• Multilingual Support: Analyzes sentiment in multiple languages for global businesses.

What is Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Sentiment Analysis?

Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Sentiment Analysis refers to the use of AI and machine learning techniques to analyze and understand human language in text form.

NLP enables sentiment analysis tools to process customer reviews, social media posts, emails, and other text-based data to determine whether the sentiment is positive, negative, or neutral.

It does this by recognizing patterns in language, identifying emotions, and even understanding context, sarcasm, and slang.

Why is Sentiment Analysis Important?

Here’s why sentiment analysis is important, plus the benefits your brand receives from each item:

1. Improves Customer Experience: Understanding customer emotions helps businesses identify pain points and improve interactions across all touchpoints.

• Benefit: Higher satisfaction and loyalty lead to increased product sales and repeat purchases, driving revenue growth.

2. Enhances Brand Reputation: Early detection of negative feedback allows businesses to respond proactively, preventing brand damage and negative press.

• Benefit: Positive brand perception encourages word-of-mouth marketing, making customers more likely to recommend your business.

3. Boosts Customer Retention: Identifying unhappy customers gives businesses the chance to resolve issues before they switch to competitors.

• Benefit: Reduced churn ensures long-term customer relationships, stabilizing revenue and increasing lifetime customer value.

4: Informs Product Development: Analyzing feedback helps businesses understand what customers love and dislike about products.

• Benefit: Companies can refine existing products or develop new features based on real customer needs, improving market fit.

5. Optimizes Marketing Strategies: Knowing how customers feel about your brand allows for better targeting and messaging.

• Benefit: Tailored marketing campaigns drive stronger engagement, higher conversion rates, and better ROI on advertising spend.

6. Tracks Competitor Sentiment: Understanding how customers perceive competitors helps businesses identify market gaps and differentiate themselves.

• Benefit: Gaining a competitive edge allows for better positioning, pricing strategies, and product differentiation.

7. Automates Feedback Analysis: AI-driven tools can process vast amounts of customer feedback from reviews, social media, and surveys in real time.

• Benefit: Saves time and resources by eliminating manual data analysis, allowing businesses to act quickly on insights.

8. Improves Decision-Making: Data-driven insights from sentiment analysis provide a clearer picture of customer needs and market trends.

• Benefit: Businesses can make informed strategic decisions that lead to sustainable growth, higher customer satisfaction, and competitive advantage.

Use Cases of Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis is a powerful tool that helps businesses understand customer emotions and make data-driven decisions. Here are some key ways companies apply sentiment analysis to improve their operations:

Join our Free Membership

Get unlimited access to all things CX, UX, and design thinking: articles, newsletters, in-depth guides, and exclusive resources.

Email*

By signing up, you agree to receive occasional emails. You can unsubscribe anytime. See our Privacy Policy for details.

Email

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Predicting Customer Churn

Businesses can analyze customer feedback, support tickets, and social media comments to identify negative sentiment patterns. If customers express frustration or dissatisfaction, sentiment analysis can flag them as potential churn risks.

By addressing their concerns proactively—such as offering personalized support or discounts—companies can improve retention rates and reduce customer attrition.

Tailoring Marketing Efforts

Marketing teams use sentiment analysis to gauge customer reactions to campaigns, product launches, and brand messaging. By analyzing responses in real-time, businesses can adjust their strategies to better align with customer preferences.

For example, if a social media campaign receives overwhelmingly positive sentiment, marketers may allocate more budget to expand its reach. Conversely, if sentiment trends negative, they can quickly pivot messaging to improve engagement.

Enhancing Customer Support

Sentiment analysis helps customer service teams prioritize and respond to issues more effectively. AI-driven tools can automatically detect angry or frustrated messages in support tickets and escalate them to human agents for faster resolution.

Analyzing sentiment trends over time helps businesses identify recurring pain points, leading to improvements in products and services.

How To Improve Customer Sentiment

Let’s dial down the jargon for a minute:

“Improve customer sentiment” is another way to say “make customers happy.” And there are million-and-one ways to make customers happy.

But to affect customer happiness at scale, you need to consolidate a lot of data. Sentiment data helps you understand what you’re doing right, what you’re doing wrong, and how to improve.

Here’s how to stay ahead in the customer sentiment game:

1. Make life easy for your customers

You might have the greatest product in the world—but if it’s complicated to buy and use, your customers won’t be happy. Customer effort score is a measure of the effort customers put in to get their desired outcome, and it covers the customer journey from checkout to onboarding to daily use.

Much of customer satisfaction management is about staying tuned in to customers’ experience with your product and service. By helping them get what they want quickly and easily, you’ll boost loyalty and satisfaction—and, by extension, sentiment.

A few ways to make life easy for your customers:

• Easy signup
• Fast time to value
• Helpful onboarding
• Painless customer service

If you haven’t gone through your own customer experience recently, consider doing it. It’ll give you greater empathy for your users.

Make a note of your own subjective experiences and frustrations. Then, dig into customer sentiment data to look for data-driven opportunities to make life easier for customers. Look for keywords like “complicated” and “slow,” or feelings like “frustrated.” Make a list of roadblocks you can smooth over.

Take a close look at your product’s time to value, too. This metric measures how long customers have to wait to reach their goal. Customers want to get value immediately after buying your product. The faster you can help them do that, the happier they’ll be.

For example, Ahrefs, an SEO tool, offers a suite of free tools that provide value before you’ve spent a penny with them—and don’t even require you to log in.

2. Get better at customer service

As you comb through customer feedback, you’ll likely find that a significant percentage of it is focused on customer service interactions. This makes sense: by the time customers reach out for help, they’ve already had an issue with your product. It doesn’t take much to push them over the edge into frustration.

And customers are pickier than ever about service—72% of them will jump to another brand after a single bad customer experience. That means stellar customer service is a major competitive advantage.

Your sentiment tools can analyze customer service interactions and tell you what customers love, what frustrates them, and what they wish was different. For example, you may find that customers are frustrated that no one follows up with them on their support tickets, which suggests that you need to make changes to your process. Or, you might find that long response times are the biggest issue, in which case hiring more agents or incorporating chatbots might be the solution.

Most companies have poor customer service, so you’ll stand out if you can find a way to go above and beyond. Zappos, the shoe company, encourages its customer support team to chat leisurely with customers rather than aiming for efficiency. And they take that mission seriously—a Zappos employee once logged a 10-hour, 43-minute customer service call.

3. Refine your products and marketing

Product development and marketing strategies aren’t the products of misunderstood geniuses, despite what Mad Men would have us believe.

Instead, the best marketing campaigns and product ideas come from your customers—the people using your products daily.

Customer sentiment analysis gives you deeper insight into what your customers want. You can run sentiment analysis on surveys, review sites, and social media posts to get a better understanding of what your customers are saying about your brand. This information can help you fix issues that need attention and optimize your pricing, marketing, and product launches.

Below, Canva does a great job incorporating customer feedback from social media into their product development plan—although it seems they haven’t yet added the requested feature. (C’mon, Canva!)

4. Don’t stop improving—and pivot when necessary

Setting up your customer sentiment software and rolling out your first batch of improvements is just the start. Since customer sentiment is always changing, you need to continuously adapt too.

If you listen closely, your customers are telling you exactly what to do. Let's say you're a B2B SaaS company, and you've received 50 negative customer reviews. Ten reviews deal with onboarding, 25 with customer support, and 15 with feature limitations.

By consolidating the feedback from those reviews with other sources of feedback, you can put together a product and service improvement plan that tackles the precise struggles customers have with your product.

You’ll also want to pay special attention to customer sentiment after making big changes, like updates to your pricing, product, or social media strategy. Customer sentiment serves as a crucial indicator of how your target audience is receiving your changes—positive sentiment tells you to stay the course, and negative sentiment tells you when to pivot.

5. Personalize Cutomer Interactions

Customers appreciate brands that treat them as individuals rather than just another sale. Personalization makes interactions more meaningful and builds stronger emotional connections.

Use customer data (purchase history, preferences, and past interactions) to tailor product recommendations, email campaigns, and support responses. AI-powered chatbots and CRM systems can help automate personalized interactions at scale.

This way, customers feel valued, leading to higher satisfaction, increased loyalty, and more positive word-of-mouth.

6. Empower Your Employees

Employees on the front lines—customer support agents, sales reps, and social media managers—play a crucial role in shaping customer sentiment. When they have the right tools and autonomy, they can resolve issues faster and provide better service.

Invest in employee training, equip them with AI-driven insights, and allow them the flexibility to make customer-friendly decisions without excessive red tape. Encouraging a customer-first mindset fosters better interactions.

The impact? Employees feel more confident and motivated, leading to better customer experiences, quicker issue resolution, and more positive interactions.

7. Utilizing Real-Time Analytics

Businesses that monitor customer sentiment in real-time can respond quickly to concerns, preventing small issues from escalating into major complaints.

Use AI-driven sentiment analysis tools to track social media mentions, reviews, and support interactions as they happen. Implement real-time alerts so teams can address negative feedback immediately.

Proactive engagement helps improve brand perception, enhances crisis management, and ensures that businesses stay ahead of customer concerns.

Resolving The Root Causes Of Negative Sentiment

Jumping onto social media and handling individual customer complaints can feel like playing whack-a-mole—and if you never address the underlying problems, that’s exactly what it is.

To address negative customer sentiment in a meaningful way, you need to figure out the root cause so you can provide a better customer experience.

Here’s where zooming in on individual customers helps.

Use individual customers to tell the story

By using customer sentiment tools, you can analyze thousands of social media posts and customer reviews and learn how customers feel about your brand.

But to really drive home the message the data is telling you, it’s helpful to review representative feedback from individual customers.

For example, at the end of 2022, the software company Adobe raised their prices. Users communicated their frustration on social media—not only at the price increase but at the difficulty of canceling the product. Stories like this help humanize the data and clarify what needs to be changed to improve customer sentiment.

Watch for patterns

Once you’ve reviewed some representative cases from individual customers, it’s time to zoom out.

For example, if multiple customers are reporting long customer service wait times, you know that’s a problem you need to deal with. Or, if customers say they aren’t getting much value out of your product, you know you’ve got a “time to value” issue.

Use sentiment analysis data to verify that the anecdotal issues you reviewed are, in fact, large-scale problems.

If so, it’s time to put changes in place.

Scale your changes

So, you’ve got a few customer experience problems on your hands.

By identifying them, you’re already ahead of most companies.

Now it’s time to figure out how to address your root causes. This could involve updating your product or processes, re-training your support team, or making other improvements to your customer experience.

Stay flexible, keep monitoring sentiment after your changes, and make adjustments as needed to ensure that the issues don't crop up again.

Surprise And Delight Customers

Never forget that your customers’ relationship with your brand is emotional, not rational. 95% of decision-making for purchases takes place in the subconscious mind.

That means that little changes in your customer experience can go a long way. “Surprise and delight” may be a marketing cliche, but it can have a big impact on customer sentiment.

Just look at Pret A Manger, the coffee shop chain. They’ve become known for encouraging staff to give out free coffees randomly as a way to create positive customer experiences—and they have the social media buzz to prove it.

If you want to adopt a surprise-and-delight strategy to improve customer sentiment, here are a few places to start:

Be available and stay empathetic

86% of people still prefer human interaction over chatbots, and 71% are less likely to use a brand if there are no human customer service reps available.

That means one of the best ways to supercharge your customer sentiment is to have real people available to attend to your customers’ needs—and to train them to listen empathetically.

Follow up on customer requests

When customers take the time to request product features, the least you can do is acknowledge their request and thank them. But if you’re taking customer loyalty seriously, consider going a step further: close the feedback loop by getting back to the customer once their request has been implemented.

Imagine how delighted you’d be if a company reached out personally to let you know that a feature or new product you asked for months ago is now live.

It happens rarely, so it’s notable when you do it.

Incorporate ‘surprise and delight’ into pivotal CX moments

In every customer relationship, there are a few pivotal moments:

Onboarding

Onboarding is how you start the relationship off on the right (or wrong) foot. It’s a powerful moment that can lead customers to churn, or lead them toward retention.

The best thing you can do here is shepherd customers as quickly as possible toward their “aha” moment—the instant in which they experience the value they hoped for.

If you’re a retailer, an above-and-beyond onboarding experience might mean training your delivery staff to assemble products in your customers’ homes. If you’re a SaaS company, maybe it means creating custom product walkthroughs for each customer. Do whatever it takes to give value to customers fast.

Upsells

It’s hard to imagine that upselling a customer could be a surprise-and-delight moment. But what if your upsell unlocks an incredible amount of value?

Just look at Costco, which ranks first in customer satisfaction among retailers despite requiring an annual membership for entry. Or Amazon’s Prime membership, which overwhelms customers with value, from free delivery to free movies to discounted groceries.

Get creative with your upsells and cross-sells, and make sure loyal customers know they’re getting special treatment.

Milestones

Take any opportunity you can to recognize customers and show them you appreciate them. Customer relationship milestones are a good start—find a way to celebrate your “first anniversary” of working together, for example.

This is even more impactful if you’re able to recognize personal milestones for your customers, like their birthdays. By doing something unexpected to show you care, you can keep customers happy and create fans for life.

Learn from competitors

One way to improve customer sentiment is to watch your competitors and learn from them—especially competitors who have higher sentiment scores than you.

Look for specific areas competitors are outperforming you. Then, dig in. What are they doing that you’re not?

For example, if I were one of Lego’s competitors, I’d reevaluate my customer service based on the rave review in the viral tweet below:

Of course, the opposite is true, too—you can also learn from your competitors’ failures. And you could argue that learning from failures is even more important since unhappy customers tell 16 people about their experience on average, while happy customers only tell 9 people.

Keep a close eye on competitors, and notice when they drop the ball. What are customers complaining about? Often, negative experiences fit one of these patterns:

• Broken promises
• Slow resolution times
• Repeated feedback without action
• Lack of product knowledge
• Rude customer service
• Ineffective support

American Airlines, below, drops the ball on a viral support request by simply giving the customer a phone number to call—something the customer explained they had already done several times.

By keeping a close eye on how competitors fail and succeed with customers, you can improve your customer interactions in a way that makes you look good by comparison.

Customer Sentiment Helps You Make the Right Moves, at the Right Time

Customer sentiment isn’t random. It’s the outcome of a huge number of customer touchpoints coming together for hundreds or thousands of customers.

When your customer experience is seamless, and customers are happily surprised by the value they get from your product, sentiment will be high. When your customer experience falls short, sentiment suffers.

This is good news—it means you have significant influence over customer sentiment. If sentiment is lower than you’d like, start by gathering customer feedback data. Then get to work listening to customers, adapting your products based on what they need, and delivering unforgettable service.

Interested in more ways to keep your customers happy? Don’t miss the chance to subscribe to our newsletter and get the latest CX tips.

Need expert help selecting the right Customer Engagement Software?

If you’re struggling to choose the right software, let us help you. Just share your needs in the form below and you’ll get free access to our dedicated software advisors who match and connect you with the best vendors for your needs.