User sentiment analysis: what it is and how it benefits your customers and business

Deep dive on the topic

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It’s one thing to collect feedback about your product, but quite another to read between the lines and understand how users actually feel about your brand. Not to mention figuring out what your customers are thinking as they interact with your website or digital product. 

That’s why user sentiment analysis is such a powerful technique to truly understand your customers.

User sentiment analysis uses tools and algorithms to process and interpret unstructured data—such as feedback forms, interviews, customer reviews, and social media comments. 

This analysis helps you understand customer thoughts and feelings at various stages of the buyer journey and beyond. By segmenting users and addressing issues, businesses can enhance their products, boost customer loyalty, and increase overall satisfaction.

This guide walks you through the fundamentals of user sentiment analysis—what it is, why it matters, how to analyze sentiment, and the challenges that come with it—to improve your product and reach your business and customer goals. 

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Summary

  • User sentiment is the positive, negative, or neutral feelings people have for your brand or products
  • You can collect user sentiment through things like surveys, online review sites, social media platforms, customer support tickets, and more
  • Some benefits of user sentiment analysis include being able to uncover customer emotions and motivations, gauge users’ emotional connection to your product, and monitor your brand’s reputation
  • You can perform user sentiment analysis in five steps:
    • 1. Gather your data
    • 2. Sort, process, and clean your data 
    • 3. Analyze your data using user sentiment analysis software
    • 4. Visualize and share your insights
    • 5. Put your findings into practice
  • Common challenges of user sentiment analysis include developing hypotheses, collecting data, understanding context within your datasets, and achieving a large enough data sample size

What is user sentiment? 

User sentiment is the positive, negative, or neutral thoughts and feelings customers have about your brand or product. 

For example, if a user says, “Amazon Prime’s documentary selection is better than Netflix’s,” they’re expressing positive sentiment about Amazon Prime. Or if they say, “The interface on my new phone is hard to navigate,” you know they’re not happy with the user interface (UI) design. 

However, it’s not clear—in either of these cases—exactly which emotion the user is feeling. That's why sentiment text analysis is key to gauging their level of emotional reaction and connection to your product—and improving the customer experience (CX). 

Where to find user sentiment

These days, customers express their thoughts and feelings over a variety of channels:  

  • Customer feedback: like online customer satisfaction surveys where users tell you exactly what they love and hate about your product and the customer experience
  • Chatbot or help center interactions: including call transcripts and emails to customer support teams. For example, if users are frustrated because they can’t find essential information, their messages are likely to express that emotion.  
  • Sales calls: conversation analysis tools can reveal uncertainty in a potential customer’s words, even if their hesitation is too subtle for a human to detect from their tone 
  • Product review sites: these are a goldmine of customer sentiment as people don’t hold back from expressing themselves
  • Social media platforms: through posts and comments on popular online platforms. For example, if you post about your latest update, a user might comment that they’re annoyed by the price hike.
  • Forums: industry-relevant forums can give you a glimpse into how people feel about your product and business 

Nike used social media sentiment analysis to monitor public opinion during its controversial sponsorship of NFL player Colin Kaepernick after he ‘took the knee’ before a game. Source: Sentieo.com

Benefits of user sentiment analysis

User sentiment analysis is the process of extracting objective, actionable insights from subjective, unstructured data. Analyzing user sentiment often involves using artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing (NLP)—speech recognition, natural-language understanding, and natural-language generation—to analyze datasets and recognize and understand emotions in speech and text. 

Analyzing and acting on user sentiment is key to helping you achieve your business goals, improve CX, and boost customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Analyzing user sentiment lets you:   

  • Uncover customer emotions: connect the dots on customer satisfaction scores and reveal what customers think and feel about your website, brand, and digital products. Then, respond with small changes that have a big impact. For example, analyzing feedback from an unsatisfied mobile user can pinpoint whether they’re confused, frustrated, or planning to switch to the competition. So you can prioritize changes and actions to address the issue. 
  • Understand customer motivations: discover customer motivations, pain points, and challenges. For example, if you're using Contentsquare, watch session replays of users navigating your website to find out exactly where they drop off. What they won’t reveal is what users were thinking and feeling right before they abandoned the page. So, combine session recordings with insights from feedback widgets to put two and two together and make quick-win changes to reduce drop-offs. 
  • Bring the voice of the customer (VoC) to your decision-making: align cross-functional teams, eliminate disagreement about ‘what the customer wants,’ and provide valuable insights to get buy-in from stakeholders. When you empathize with your customers in this way, you stop relying on guesswork and instead make decisions based on hard data—which puts you in a better position to achieve product-market fit and growth.  
  • Gauge users’ level of emotional connection to your product: this is an indicator of loyalty, repeat purchases, and recommendations. Customers who love your product are more likely to renew and recommend it