Every great customer experience begins with how customers feel. When those feelings turn negative, quick fixes may ease symptoms, but they rarely solve the deeper problem. That’s why tracking and responding swiftly to changes in sentiment is crucial to customer retention and business success.
Organisations can use customer sentiment analysis to measure customer feelings at scale and translate those insights into strategies that help build customer loyalty and drive revenue growth.
In this post, we explore the purpose and value of customer sentiment analysis. We also examine how artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled tools are transforming the way companies measure sentiment, align decisions with customer expectations, and gain a competitive edge.
Main Takeaways
- Customer sentiment analysis is crucial for businesses and brands seeking to understand their customers and build lasting relationships with them.
- The benefits of measuring and analysing customer sentiment are wide-ranging, including more effective marketing strategies, improved customer service, better brand reputation management, and increased customer loyalty and retention.
- Brands can improve customer sentiment by focusing on employee training, delivering more personalised experiences, and removing friction from the customer journey.
- AI-powered tools are making sentiment analysis faster and more effective. As these solutions evolve, they will continue to expand the depth and impact of customer insights, helping organisations refine their strategies and strengthen customer relationships.
What Is Customer Sentiment?
Customer sentiment is the collective emotional response customers have toward a brand, business, product, or service. It reflects feelings, attitudes, opinions, and perceptions that shape how customers engage.
Understanding sentiment helps brands identify what’s working in their outreach and where improvements are needed to strengthen loyalty.
What Is Customer Sentiment Analysis and How Does It Work?
Customer sentiment analysis isn’t just about taking the temperature of how customers feel. It’s a data-driven process that taps into the latest tools and technologies to mine interactions across every customer channel and surface insights that inform smarter business decisions.
AI-driven tools like natural language processing (NLP) interpret customer emotions from text and speech, while machine learning (ML) accurately detects and flags patterns in customer interactions. Solutions like Invoca’s Signal AI Studio bring these capabilities together, enabling businesses to detect changes in sentiment more quickly and reliably than human teams alone.
Signal AI Studio can analyse analog phone calls, breaking conversations into themes and topics to uncover true customer sentiment. For example, if complaints about a new service appear in surveys, support calls, or online reviews, the platform flags the trend — enabling your business to act quickly and resolve the issue.
The Benefits of Customer Sentiment Analysis
Speed and accuracy aren’t the only benefits of customer sentiment analysis enhanced with AI. Here are seven other reasons to embrace the process and support it with modern tools.
Reason #1: Improved Customer Experience
The better you understand customer emotions, the more effectively you can improve their experience. Sentiment analysis provides the insights needed to deliver the personalised interactions today’s customers expect.
Reason #2: Enhanced Marketing Strategies
Data insights from sentiment analysis contain the nuggets marketing needs to refine messaging, target and retarget the right audiences, and drive campaign tweaks that can increase engagement and boost marketing ROI.
Reason #3: Improved Agent Coaching
Sentiment monitoring shows how satisfied customers really are, and where their expectations are changing. By collecting data from calls, chats, and reviews, call centre managers can create a powerful knowledge base to coach and train agents, enabling them to deliver better customer experiences.
Reason #4: Data-Driven Decision-Making
Sentiment analysis provides quantifiable metrics that empower businesses to make smarter, data-driven decisions and guide both strategy and operations with greater confidence.
Reason #5: Better Brand Reputation Management
Continuous sentiment monitoring strengthens brand reputation management by allowing businesses to spot concerns early and address them before they escalate.
Reason #6: Increased Customer Retention And Loyalty
When customers voice their frustrations, they expect quick answers. Monitoring customer sentiment continuously enables faster action — improving satisfaction while strengthening retention and long-term loyalty.
Reason #7: Competitive Advantage
Finally, real insight into customer sentiment can uncover emerging market trends and competitor moves that might otherwise go unnoticed, providing businesses with a competitive advantage.
How to Measure Customer Sentiment
As with most things, the devil is in the details when it comes to measuring customer sentiment. Here are six key sources your business can tap into to gather insights effectively and efficiently — starting with the many firsthand channels already at your disposal.
1. Customer Satisfaction Surveys
The traditional way to measure customer sentiment, and still one of the most valuable, is through surveys. You can use targeted questions to gain insight into customer satisfaction, including how likely customers will repeat business with you, and if they will refer your business to a friend. For example, you might ask, “How likely are you to purchase from us again?”
Surveys feed important customer loyalty and satisfaction KPIs like Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), and customer effort score (CES). These scores, combined with other metrics, allow you to track customer loyalty and satisfaction over time.
2. Sentiment Analysis of Phone Calls
Even in the digital age, phone calls remain the top communication channel for two-thirds of consumers, especially when they need help or have questions. Capturing sentiment from tone and language in these conversations is essential.
AI-driven tools like Invoca make this possible by analysing conversations, identifying dissatisfied customers, and enabling quick strategy adjustments and targeted agent training.
3. Social Media Monitoring
Another rich source of customer sentiment is social media. Reputation and sentiment analysis tools can scan posts, comments, mentions, hashtags, and keywords tied to your brand.
These tools classify conversations as positive, negative, or neutral, turning raw chatter into data insights that inform and refine brand strategy.
4. Customer Reviews and Ratings
Reviews and ratings are one of the clearest windows into customer sentiment. Ask for them after purchases or important touchpoints, and you’ll get insights you can’t find anywhere else.
With AI text analysis tools, you can quickly scan thousands of reviews and ratings, spot patterns in customer sentiment, and use those insights to shape your business strategy.
5. Support Chats and Emails
Chat logs and emails also hold a wealth of customer sentiment. With AI text analysis, you can spot patterns — like frequent complaints — faster than ever. That way, you can celebrate what agents are doing well and focus on training strategies that will make the greatest difference.
6. Track Sentiment Over Time
Customer sentiment shouldn’t be measured in snapshots alone. For instance, monitoring only after product launches may skew results toward the perceived value of each release.
Instead, monitor sentiment analysis regularly (such as quarterly), and before and after major customer-focused events like policy changes or product launches. Doing so builds a deeper view of sentiment, enabling timely issue resolution and more accurate trend prediction.
How to Use Your Customer Sentiment Score
Customer sentiment scores are more than just numbers. They are powerful insights that can drive change across the business. Marketing teams can use them to develop and refine campaigns, contact centres can apply them to improve training and coaching, and product teams can leverage them to inspire innovation.
For quick wins, go beyond the score itself — dig into the details to uncover pain points and fix them fast to improve customer experiences.
How to Improve Customer Sentiment
Let’s say your customer sentiment score indicates there’s significant room for improvement. Don’t worry! Here are practical steps you can take to raise it.
1. Enhance Customer Service Response
Customer service is often the first, and sometimes the last, line of response for customers. Ongoing coaching ensures agents stay sharp and confident. Encourage them to turn negatives into positives by responding quickly and with empathy.
2. Personalise Customer Interactions
Customers overwhelmingly want personalisation. Small touches — like tailoring marketing communications, using names, or offering customised online suggestions — can win them over.
Tools like Invoca PreSense help set that tone from the start by bridging online and offline journeys. PreSense gives agents key insights as the call begins, such as the caller’s name and likely reason for calling, so they can personalise the experience from the very first “hello.”
See how PreSense works in the short video below:
3. Invest in Staff Training
If you want to improve customer sentiment, don’t cut corners on training. New hires should go through structured onboarding — with pre-boarding, ongoing training, and support from a mentor or “buddy.”
Customer-facing teams also need continuous development to strengthen communication and problem-solving skills. Pro tip: You can supercharge training by using real-world scenarios drawn from phone calls captured with AI-driven tools like Invoca.
4. Reduce Friction in Customer Journeys
Customer sentiment improves if you eliminate friction throughout the customer journey. Consider creating a more friction-free path for customers by adding more self-service options, such as chatbots and FAQs, to speed the resolution of simple inquiries and reduce frustration.
To keep the customer experience consistent, align messaging across channels. And utilise technology, such as Invoca PreSense, to offer customers a seamless transition from online to offline experiences.
5. Foster Brand Trust and Transparency
Promoting a culture of trust and transparency is another effective way to strengthen customer sentiment. Show customers you’re listening by acknowledging their feedback. Sometimes, a simple “We heard you … ” is enough.
Equally important is clear, consistent communication. Company policies should be easy to find across your website, marketing materials, and FAQs. The same applies to pricing: Sentiment suffers quickly if customers see different packages offered by phone than online or through direct mail.
6. Engage Proactively on Social Media
When used strategically, social media offers an accessible, cost-efficient channel for shaping sentiment. Identify the platforms most relevant to your audience and invest in meaningful engagement. Addressing questions and concerns in real time signals responsiveness and reinforces your brand’s commitment to customer satisfaction.
7. Continuously Update Products and Services
Lastly, don’t let the customer experience become stale! Keep it fresh by using customer feedback from surveys, social media, and phone conversations to drive innovation in your products, services, marketing campaigns, and throughout the customer journey.
Top Customer Sentiment Analysis Tools
You can boost customer sentiment by leveraging technology for assistance. These four tools are considered the best customer sentiment analysis tools in the industry.
- Brandwatch is a U.K.-based consumer intelligence and social listening platform owned by Cision. Brandwatch uses AI and NLP to gather and analyse data from various online sources, including social media, influencer blogs, forums, and news sites.
- Invoca connects online marketing to offline revenue for a frictionless customer journey using AI-driven conversation analytics tools. Invoca automatically captures 100% of calls and turns the conversations into actionable insights for sales, marketing, and customer service teams.
- Lexalytics is an enterprise analytics platform that combines NLP with AI to allow enterprises to convert unstructured text from various sources, such as comments, articles, reviews, customer emails, survey responses, and other documents, into actionable data.
- ReviewTrackers is a reputation and customer feedback platform that aggregates reviews from more than 100 platforms (e.g., Facebook, TripAdvisor). It analyses sentiment with AI and NLP, offers analytics to help businesses improve reputation and customer experience, and more.
Future Trends in Customer Sentiment Analysis
So, that’s an overview of the present state of customer sentiment analysis. Now, what about the future? Look for ongoing advancements in AI, NLP, and ML to continue to refine how customer sentiment is measured — improving accuracy and the speed at which businesses can detect emerging trends.
We can also expect to see new data sources enter the mix, from podcasts and video reviews to industry-specific datasets. In healthcare, for example, researchers are exploring ways to lift sentiment insights from the text sections of Electronic Health Records (EHRs).
Because AI evolves quickly, businesses must stay current with innovation to maximise the value of sentiment analysis strategies. Tools like Copilot, ChatGPT search, and Google AI can help, provided you know the right questions to ask.
Capture Deep Sentiment Analysis Data with Invoca’s AI
Customer sentiment analytics is essential for brands that want to deliver better customer experiences and build stronger, lasting customer relationships.
The right tools let you go beyond surface insights to reveal what truly matters to your customers — what’s on their mind and how they feel — and turn those insights into action. Invoca’s AI-powered sentiment analysis connects digital and phone interactions, delivering a complete view of sentiment across the customer journey.
Additional Reading
See these resources for more ways Invoca’s AI can help improve the customer experience:
- 6 Ways AI Can Deepen Customer Experiences
- AI for the Customer Experience: Benefits, Challenges, and 10 Examples
- How to Personalise Customer Experiences With Data Analytics
When you’re ready, book a free demo with our team to learn more about how Invoca’s AI can help you surface customer sentiment from phone calls and turn those insights into action.
