As your marketing and sales teams collaborate to move the needle on revenue, consider the fact that it’s five times less expensive to keep an existing customer than to win a new one. So, how do you build stronger bonds with your customers? Not to sound like a marriage counselor, but relationships are all about communication. If you don’t understand your customers’ feelings, how can you expect to make them happy? How can you tell if they’re satisfied with your brand or if they have one foot out the door?
The thing is, communicating with your thousands of customers isn’t as easy as pouring them a glass of red wine and asking, “What’s on your mind?” Your brand simply doesn’t have the time — nor the sheer quantity of wine — to have that many heart-to-hearts.
To overcome these challenges, sales and marketing teams are tapping into the latest AI tools. With the power of artificial intelligence, teams can analyze thousands of customer communications at scale to gain a deeper understanding of how customers truly feel about their brand. They can then use these insights to enhance agent coaching, eliminate barriers to purchase, and create seamless experiences that foster customer loyalty. Keep reading to learn more!
What Is Customer Sentiment?
Let’s start with the basics — customer sentiment refers to the overall emotional attitude or feeling that customers have towards a company, its products, services, or brand. It encompasses the collection of positive, negative, or neutral perceptions that customers form based on their direct experiences, interactions, and observations throughout their customer journey.
What Tools Can My Brand Use to Measure Customer Sentiment?
Consumers use numerous touchpoints to engage with companies, including website visits, phone calls, social media mentions, online reviews, and more. Each of these interactions is brimming with rich insights about their likes, dislikes, and feelings about your brand. To get a complete picture of consumer sentiment, you should capture data from as many channels as you can. Below are some of the top data collection tools you can tap into:
- Website interaction analysis: Website analytics tools track user behaviors like rage clicks, scroll patterns, and time on page to identify frustration points in the customer journey. These platforms create visual representations such as heatmaps and session recordings that reveal exactly how users navigate your site and where they encounter difficulties.
- Social media monitoring: Social listening platforms scan conversations across multiple social networks to detect mentions of your brand, products, or relevant topics. These tools apply sentiment analysis algorithms to categorize mentions as positive, negative, or neutral, allowing brands to understand overall perception and respond to issues in real time.
- Survey tools: Structured feedback mechanisms like NPS and CSAT collect direct customer opinions at key touchpoints throughout the customer journey. This data can be tracked over time and compared across business units, products, or competitors.
- Review management: Review monitoring platforms aggregate customer reviews from across the web into centralized dashboards for analysis and response management. These tools typically offer sentiment tracking, competitive benchmarking, and alert systems for negative reviews that require immediate attention.
- Voice analytics: Conversation analytics platforms use AI to analyze customer phone calls for tone, keywords, and emotional signals. These systems can automatically categorize calls by customer intent and sentiment, turning unstructured voice data into actionable insights about product issues, service quality, and competitive mentions (more info on these tools in the next section!)
Track Caller and Agent Sentiment with Invoca AI
Phone conversations are one of the richest sources of customer sentiment data — in these interactions, callers are literally telling you what they want and how to make them happy. Many also use the channel to voice their frustrations about experiences they’ve had with your brand. However, phone conversations are often underutilized by marketers, since listening to thousands of phone calls isn’t feasible or scalable. That’s where artificial intelligence comes in — with the power of AI, you can analyze phone calls at scale and extract actionable insights instantly.
Invoca’s solution gives you a deeper layer of customer sentiment data than others on the market. Most speech analytics tools only track the overall sentiment of a call, flagging a call as either “positive” or “negative.” But call-level sentiment isn’t always useful or actionable.
We believe that the real opportunity lies in the ability to track caller and agent sentiment separately and monitor how it changes throughout a conversation. So we built our sentiment analysis solution to track not only the individual sentiment of the caller and the agent separately, but also how it changes throughout the call. This makes it possible to monitor how effective agents are at turning a caller’s negative sentiment to positive, as an example.
To build our industry-leading solution, our data science team fine-tuned neural network models with thousands of instructions tailored to both the caller and the agent, encompassing a range of positive and negative sentiments. The end result is AI that delivers accurate and actionable sentiment data businesses can visualize in our dashboards and reports to drive the right actions and improve outcomes.
4 Ways to Drive Revenue Growth With Invoca’s Customer Sentiment Data
Now that we’ve covered the nuts and bolts of what Invoca’s sentiment analysis tool is and how it works, let’s dive into some actionable tips you can use to put it to work. In this section, we’ll show you three ways cutting-edge marketing and contact center teams use this feature to drive revenue growth.
1. Tailor Agent Coaching Based on Strengths and Weaknesses
According to our research, 62% of contact center managers can’t score enough calls to accurately measure agent performance. This leaves them unable to understand their agents’ strengths and weaknesses and provide personalized training to help them improve.
When you use a tool like Invoca’s sentiment analysis, you can track how well your agents keep customers satisfied throughout every interaction. With Invoca’s powerful AI, you can pinpoint exactly when customer sentiment shifts from positive to negative — you can then drill down into what your agent said to cause the change. You can also evaluate how effectively your agents de-escalate situations with dissatisfied customers. This will give you a more complete picture of agent performance — you can, in turn, give them tailored training to improve customer service and close rates.
2. Adjust Scripts to Address Common Frustrations
Call center scripts are living documents that require constant refinement. The most effective organizations continuously improve their scripts, using real interaction data to regularly update language, remove friction points, and improve the customer experience.
Tools like Invoca provide invaluable insights into this refinement process by analyzing customer sentiment at scale. By mapping sentiment changes to specific talking points, companies can pinpoint exactly which phrases trigger positive reactions or cause frustration. This data-driven approach allows script writers to strengthen high-performing components, rework problematic sections, and equip agents with the right tools to make customers happy.
3. Contact Frustrated Customers Immediately to Recoup Opportunities
Our research shows 66% of consumers stop doing business with a brand after just a single bad experience. So, when a caller expresses negative sentiment to one of your agents, chances are they’re heading straight to a competitor. But with Invoca, you can turn these potential losses into rescued appointments and sales. Our platform automatically alerts your team when negative sentiment calls occur, allowing you to call them back to rectify any issues. You can also sync this data with your CRM to ensure your agents have the necessary context to personalize conversations.
4. Gain Deeper Customer Understanding for Marketing Messaging
The best marketers take the time to understand their customers on a deep level so they can craft messaging that truly resonates with them. Customer sentiment tools give marketers a unique advantage because they unearth patterns of frustration, concern, and satisfaction that might otherwise remain hidden in the noise of data. This allows teams to align their messaging directly with actual customer pain points rather than assumed ones, creating content that speaks directly to real needs.
If you want to get granular, you can generate reports that show which marketing channels are driving negative sentiment calls. This helps you identify which messages may be confusing or frustrating customers, so you can adjust accordingly. Below is a sample report:
Sentiment analysis also gives marketers valuable competitive intelligence by surfacing how consumers feel about rival products or services. You can incorporate these insights into campaigns that highlight competitive advantages. This approach will help you keep a pulse on consumer preferences and position your brand as the clear favorite in the market.
Additional Reading
Want to learn more about how leading brands use Invoca to tap into the voice of the customer? Check out these resources:
- What Is Conversation Analytics? Practical Applications & Benefits
- 5 Ways Contact Centers Use Analytics to Convert More Callers to Customers
- Call Center Scripts: Best Practices and Examples
