Measuring Customer Sentiment to Improve Your Business

Successful companies collect and analyze data from customers to identify customer sentiments, which can be used to identify areas of improvement and strengths.

Customer sentiment analysis is a powerful tool that gives insight into the thoughts and feelings of consumers. By understanding how your company is perceived by its customers you can make adjustments to improve it or find out what aspects are most valued by your target audience.

Here we will learn more about the different ways restaurants can use sentiment analysis, such as analyzing online ratings and reviews, to see if they are meeting customers’ needs.

Using Ratings and Reviews to Measure Customer Sentiment

Not only are ratings and reviews good for your bottom line, but they are also great for spotting trends and measuring customer sentiment.

Measuring customer sentiment can give you very deep insight into your customer base. It tells you not only what customers like and dislike, but the reasoning behind the way they feel that way.

This allows for actionable insight to improve the customer experience, manage complaints better, spot trends, spot new opportunities — all of which can increase brand loyalty and repeat customers.

Examples of Using Customer Sentiment to Improve Business

For example, you may discover consistent negative reviews about a certain menu item being too salty or not large enough in portion size – so you change the recipe and increase portion size. This is a great example of being able to make positive changes based on customer sentiment.

It is valuable unsolicited customer feedback at no cost whatsoever. It tells you what customers like and dislike about your product or service, but it also provides you with extremely valuable information on why they feel that way.

Customer sentiment analysis is the process of obtaining and analyzing this feedback from customers.

To get the most out of your data, you need to be able to focus on the big picture while also looking at specific details. In using sentiment analysis tools, customer feedback becomes clear and useful information that can help you make targeted changes to improve your marketing, operations, and overall customer experience.

Use a Word Cloud to Spot Sentiment More Easily

Bloom Intelligence offers great customer sentiment tools to help you optimize your marketing and operations.

Bloom is integrated with Google and Facebook. Using Google and Facebook ratings and reviews, Bloom allows you to read, manage, and respond to all reviews in one centralized platform.

Moreover, the platform will analyze all of your ratings and provide you with an AI-driven word cloud to show a graphical image of positive, neutral, and negative words and phrases from all of your reviews on Google and Facebook.

In the image above, green is positive, grey is neutral, and red is negative.

You can easily see what your customers like about your place of business, and what could use improvement. For instance, using the example above, you can see that customers enjoy your food, but are frequently upset by your limited parking and long wait times.

Respond To All Reviews

It is also very important that you respond to your reviews to help build positive customer sentiment.

If a review is great, thank the reviewer and tell them you hope to see them again soon. If the review is positive, but not glowing, try to see if you can spot something that would have made their experience better.

Responding to negative reviews is also very important. Your response to a negative review can actually influence and impress potential future customers.

Make sure to respond in a positive tone and provide an effective solution to the issues that caused the negativity.

This shows that you are actively listening to your customers and that you commit yourself and your company to making things better. Make sure and take action to resolve the issue.

These are just a few examples of using customer reviews to make your customer experience and sentiment better – the options are endless.

By monitoring and evaluating customer sentiment, and then taking action based on it, you can keep your restaurant top-of-mind of your local consumers, build that five-star reputation, and watch your business grow.