[Key Indicators] How To Measure The Customers’ Feelings For Your Business

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In any market, offering great products or services is simply not enough to beat your competition.

While good products and services definitely lead to increased sales, they don’t guarantee customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction is the degree to which a customer is happy with your products, services, experience or brand.

It is the driving factor behind customer love for your brand and should be monitored regularly.

Given that happy customers buy more from you, readily refer your brand and stay with you longer, you cannot afford to be ignorant of your customers’ feelings for your brand.

Here are six ways you can measure your customers’ feelings and know the areas you need to improve to make them happier.

1. Use surveys to measure net emotion value (NEV)

Net emotion value (NEV) is the number that represents your customers’ feelings towards your business on a scale.

It can be calculated by subtracting the average of negative emotions recorded (such as unhappy, stressed and dissatisfied) from the average of the positive emotions (such as happy, helpful and trusted.)

The best practical example of how the NEV of your company can be calculated is by taking a look at how live chat workers do it. After they are done helping a customer, they will give a short survey asking them to rate their experience. As more customers take the survey and the data piles up, the company acquires all the information they need to calculate their NEV.

There are two major advantages of using NEV to gain insight into your customers’ feelings;

1. It’s easy to set up. The survey used can be behavior-triggered thus reducing the effort and monitoring needed.
2. It can be implemented at the individual level. Unlike mass data collection strategies that involve a lot of estimation, NEV surveys are individually taken, thus leading to more accurate data collection.

Don’t use trial and error tactics to estimate customer emotions. Set up an NEV survey today to get a better understanding of how your customers really feel about your business.

2. Conduct sentiment analysis for individual interactions

Sentiment analysis is the process of determining whether an interaction is positive, neutral or negative. It is also called opinion mining since the person conducting the analysis aims at deriving the opinions, emotions or attitudes expressed in an interaction.

Though sentiment analysis and NEV are closely related, they are set up differently. While NEV is heavily dependent on customer rating and direct customer feedback, sentiment analysis is more interested in the conversation. It analyzes every bit of the messages coming from customers to try and detect different feelings and attitudes portrayed. No surveys are needed in sentiment analysis.

To streamline the analysis, you can use a sentiment analysis software that is automated to analyze all customer interactions. Such software can detect sarcasm, surprise, anger, disappointment and other feelings in the messages received from customers.

The main advantages of sentiment analysis include;

1. It can be implemented across all communication channels. The software used can be integrated with all marketing and communication channels to ensure that you are not missing out on any data.
2. It can detect opinion changes in interaction. This is very useful when your customers feel differently about various aspects of your business such as your website, products or customer service effectiveness.
3. It can effectively detect different feelings. This makes its findings more accurate and thus more valuable to your team.

Don’t speculate or assume to know what your customer feel without carrying out a conclusive analysis. Sentiment analysis will remove all the guesswork out of the equation and give you a clear picture of your customers’ feelings.

3. Social media monitoring

Using social media analysis to detect your customer’s emotions is fairly straightforward.

The approach and tools you use are solely dependent on the social media platform you choose. This is because different platforms have different features, meaning that different metrics are used to analyze each channel.

When implementing social media analysis, you start by creating a custom campaign to help you track emotions related to the aspects of your business that you want to gain insight into.

Monitoring a specific aspect, such as the usefulness of your products, narrows down the data you collect, making it easier to analyze and draw more accurate conclusions. While your campaign is running, try tracking all the metrics you had settled on.

Some useful metrics to track include;

1. Customer reactions such as likes and dislikes
2. Number of shares or retweets
3. Number of positive and negative comments
4. Comment velocity- how fast the conversation around your campaign is moving

Social media analysis can be used in conjunction with sentiment analysis since some of the data collected e.g. comments can be used for sentiment analysis.

Due to the first-paced nature of conversations on social media, using an automated monitoring tool such as Meltwater, and Socialmention can make the process easier and more accurate.

4. Use customer data to calculate net promoter score (NPS)

NPS is the value that represents the likelihood of your customers recommending your brand and products to other people.

Customer studies show that 84 percent of customers trust product recommendations made by friends and family and are thus more likely to make a purchase. Given these numbers, it would be unwise to ignore the value that referral marketing can have on your business and its profits.

Customers only recommend products that they have found useful and that come from brands they love and trust. Having a great product isn’t enough, customers need to fall in love with your brand so that they can recommend it to others.

This is where the NPS comes in. You have to know how likely your customers are to recommend your brand through referrals to know whether they love your business or not.

The easiest way to carry out an NPS evaluation is by asking them directly. Ask them how likely they are, on a scale of one to ten, to recommend your products. Afterward, categorize their responses and score them.

A simple scale you could use is;

1. A score of 9 or 10 are promoters
2. A score of 7 or 8 are passive promoters
3. A score of 6 and below are cynics

After grading the responses, subtract the percentage of cynics from the promoters. Alternatively, you can use an online NPS calculator to streamline the process.

5. Monitor your website’s user experience

Many business owners undervalue the effect their website has on customer experience and customer emotions.

In many cases, your website is the first point of contact for customers with your business. Which is why you need to create a killer first impression if you want to have a lasting positive impression on your customers.

Measuring the user experience on a website can be done through various ways, you could use a survey as a content gate for free resources, or email it to your customers with the promise of a free resource or a discount.

A more effective way to analyze your customer experience is to use software to monitor how customers interact with your website naturally without your interference. Some metrics you can analyze include;

1. Amount of time spent on your website. When customers spend most of their time on your blog, it means that they trust you enough to want to learn from you.
2. The number of pages visited by your customers. Disappointed or angry customers will not spend a lot of time on your website; they will browse fewer pages.

To get more accurate readings, you should mix the findings from the above metrics with the data you get when you survey your readers. Afterward, split-test different changes made to your website to find out exactly what is affecting your customers’ feelings.

The data collected from a website analysis should be used to enhance the experience of your customers as they interact with your site. For example, if most of your customers complain of a lagging or slow website, you should consider switching to faster hosting such as SSD web hosting and It is important to understand what is SSD hosting to improve customers online experience. If they complain of the colors you’ve used, consider changing the colors used to a mix that is more user-friendly.

There is no perfect website, but you should not use that as an excuse to let your website continue frustrating your customers and causing feelings of dissatisfaction or frustration.

6. Monitor churned customers to gain insight into their sentiments

A churned customer is a customer who has stopped using your product or service.

Customers stop doing business with a company for many reasons, but feelings of dissatisfaction, helplessness and other negative feelings are notorious for increasing churn rate. Studies show that up to 42 percent of consumers have left a business due to their dissatisfaction with the customer service offered.

Such insights show the value that can be found in analyzing churned customers and asking them for more information on their reasons for leaving. The best way to get churned customers to tell you more about their feelings for your product or your brand is through a churn survey.

A churn survey is sent to customers who have already stopped buying your product or have canceled their subscriptions. The survey is aimed at gauging their emotions towards your business and its products.

Some areas to probe in this survey include;

1. Their reasons for leaving
2. Their feelings towards the products they were using
3. Any comments, concerns or feedback they would like to convey

Churned customers have nothing to lose and are more likely to be more honest with you when expressing themselves. Take advantage of that honesty to learn more about your customers’ emotions.

What do you do with these insights?

At the end of the day, measuring your customers’ feelings is a waste of time if it is not going to help you improve your business.

All the insight you gain from understanding your customers’ emotions should be used to improve your products, your customer service, website experience and anything else that has an impact on your customers’ feelings.

Don’t sit back and wait for customers to leave your business. Act first by measuring their feelings; then finding ways to make them fall in love with your brand over and over again. Happier customers equal to more money.