Customer feedback is an invaluable resource for many organizations. According to Gartner, 75% of companies have shown that customer satisfaction results in sustained revenue growth through increased customer retention. Thus, feedback is essential for maintaining customer loyalty and determining how to better meet your users’ needs.
Customer feedback can be collected in many different ways and with a variety of tools. Some common sources of feedback include surveys, online reviews, live chat interactions, and social media. However, to fully benefit from customer feedback, you need to analyze the collected data accurately to uncover meaningful insights.
Properly analyzing customer feedback can be quite challenging for several reasons. For one thing, languages are complex, and people use different expressions and terms to describe their experiences. Often, customer feedback contains grammatical errors, unclear sentiments, and multiple ideas in one response.
In addition, the quality of feedback can vary considerably. For example, while some users’ feedback might be specific and actionable, others might only provide generic, non-actionable comments. As a result, while many companies collect lots of feedback from their customers, only a fraction end up using such feedback to improve their offerings.
Nevertheless, it is possible to analyze and leverage customer feedback efficiently. How, though, can you take a pile of customer feedback and transform it into actionable insights for your business? Here are three tips that can help you better analyze customer reviews.
1. Collate and categorize customer feedback
The first step in making sense of customer feedback is to collate all feedback and relevant metadata you want to analyze in one location, such as a spreadsheet. Some examples of relevant metadata include the source of the input, the date it was submitted, and how long the submitter has been a customer.
Once you’ve got all the data in one location, you can begin categorizing the feedback using whatever criteria seems appropriate. For example, you can organize feedback based on sentiment, themes, segments, departments, type, and channels.
Sorting customer feedback into categories and sub-categories is essential for making sense of a large quantity of diverse feedback. It also helps you to get a big picture overview of the feedback and quickly identify root causes.
It’s vital to avoid discarding any customer data as seemingly unremarkable or incomplete feedback might help spot trends or contain other essential details.
It’s also essential to evaluate both positive and negative comments. Since research shows that 90% of customers are influenced by positive reviews when making purchase decisions, analyzing negative feedback is essential to fixing the issues and changing customers’ opinions.
2. Perform sentiment analysis
Sentiment analysis, or opinion mining, is a process used to determine the emotional tone or sentiment of a piece of text or speech. It’s often performed in an automated manner, making it an efficient way to gauge the general sentiment of your customers toward your brand or product.
In addition to data from other sources, customer feedback can be retrieved through web scraping for sentiment analysis. Such data scraping activity helps to speed up the feedback analysis process. Scraping sentiment analysis data can be done using SERPMaster – it’s a tool that acquires Google search result data on a large scale. Using SERPMaster, you can gather large volumes of news headlines, reviews, and other data that’s displayed on Google SERPs.
Performing sentiment analysis on collected feedback is a great way to identify your company’s strengths and weaknesses and opportunities for improvement. In addition, monitoring your customers’ attitudes towards your products and services can enable you to adapt to meet their dynamic needs quickly.
3. Share summary of feedback analysis
Once you’ve carefully analyzed customer feedback data and determined a plan of action to deal with issues, it’s crucial to ensure that key stakeholders across your organization are informed of the results. You can create a summary of the insights gained from the feedback analysis process and discuss it with your team.
You’ll need to make sure that the right individuals are provided with clear instructions and guidelines and held accountable for their role in delivering a high-quality customer experience. It’s also important to motivate team members to work with the new policies and give them adequate time to adjust.
Conclusion
Properly analyzing and leveraging customer feedback is more important than ever to stay ahead of the competition. By applying the tips mentioned above and leveraging data scraping for sentiment analysis, you can maximize the ROI on the time and effort you spend on collecting and analyzing customer feedback.
