Customer Sentiment. What is it and why is it so important to your business.
Riley
- Last Updated: May 13, 2024
Do you really know how your customers feel about your business?
Understanding how your customers feels about your business, product or services will give you insights to improve their experience, boost your revenue and increase the value of your business.
However, understanding and measuring customer sentiment can be time consuming, and complex. After all, you just want to get on with running your business.
- Companies that leverage customer insights tend to grow eight times faster than the global GDP and at least 2.5 times faster than their competitors.
- Research from Microsoft found that 77% of customers view brands more favourably if they seek out and apply customer feedback
By actively measuring and acting upon customer feedback, your businesses can improve customer satisfaction, identify new opportunities, and tailor products or services to better meet changing customer needs.
Yep, we’ve all been spammed for feedback from businesses – emails, texts, and even calls – which can be tiring as a customer.
But there are engaging and interesting ways to go about this as a business interacting with customers directly. We explain how below.
Gathering feedback to measure sentiment (the attitude to your customers toward your business) is not the same as gathering reviews.
It is where you take control by proactively collecting feedback through different and organic methods.
It’s how you get control of customer feedback, before someone else does!
6 different ways for SME’s to gather customer feedback
Ask for it: Empower staff to ask customers for feedback and set up a way to record responses (such as a tick sheet) “Hey, how was your coffee today?” “What did you think about our new range of colours?” “Would you recommend our business to your friends/family?”
In Store Surveys/Feedback forms: Why not design a simple feedback form to leave on tables or on your counter with a set of specific questions such as “How was your experience today?” “How did you find our service?” etc
These can be designed in such a way to give you very valuable insights. You can make them fun and engaging and offer small prizes for returning the forms giving you a snapshot of customer sentiment.
Social media polls: Do you have a social Platform like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter for your business?
Create a poll and ask the questions you need to know to your customers/followers. You can offer incentives for responses. Promote the poll in-store or where you interact with customers.
Community Forums: Consider posting links to your social platform/poll for even more responses and to gather a wider view of your business within the community.
These forums take work but can be a wonderful way to connect more deeply with your community that can be a powerful driver for your business and the sense of association with your brand.
Website : Create a poll, or a link to your poll on your website. You can advertise the poll in store or where you interact with customers.
You can advertise the poll instore and create links to the page/poll for more immediate responses. Incentives, of course are a great way to get people to act.
Keep questions simple, fun and to the point to avoid people clicking away or thinking it’s all too hard.
You should own your customer sentiment. It is probably the most overlooked asset in your business.
That’s because as small business owners, we are all too busy simply running the business.
You risk customer sentiment being controlled by other parties such as Google, or other review sites, rather than you managing sentiment to leverage the best from those sites.
You also risk the inherent value of your business, which are your customers.By understanding and managing customer sentiment, you can improve what you do, increasing customer goodwill.
Customer Sentiment IS your business.
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