Raise your hand if you’ve ever worked on the front lines of a brand—whether in a customer service, sales, or other front-facing CX role.
Keep your hand raised if you’ve ever dealt with an angry customer.
Keep your hand raised AND pat yourself on the back if you helped that customer go from angry to happy.
The best customer service folks are talented at noticing, processing, and steering the emotions and perceptions of the person on the other end of the line—i.e., they can influence customer sentiment.
Brands have a great opportunity to learn from these situations where a customer calms down over the course of an interaction. (They also can learn a lot from moments where customers become more keyed up.) These learnings, in turn, can impact customer experience for the better.
Here’s how you can use customer sentiment to improve your CX.
Gather the data.
The first step to just about any CX improvement project is gathering data. But customer sentiment won’t be found in a post-call CSAT score. Although customer sentiment data can be tricky to code, it’s especially valuable because it’s based on real-time reactions and doesn’t require self-reporting.
You’ll want to collect customer sentiment data from multiple channels. Use a tool that leverages AI to distill conversations into sentiment graphs. Paid social media posting platforms often have an option for analyzing comments and DM sentiment. A comprehensive platform such as MaestroQA analyzes call and chat tickets via a robust built-in dashboard. This dashboard uses AI to surface tickets containing negative customer sentiment—even if they don’t have a CSAT score. Intuitive charts and graphs convert raw sentiment data into actionable insights for CX leaders.
Only once you have your data in hand can you manipulate it to find trends. And use those discoveries to improve your total customer experience.
