Brand engagement is critical for modern businesses. Every touchpoint with your app or service is an opportunity for you to nurture positive interactions and experiences. But developing a healthy brand relationship with your customers is fraught with challenges that are often on public display when they occur.

Whether customers are leaving you glowing reviews in the App Store or warning others against using your services on social media, we know that customer feedback is honest, unfiltered, and emotional.

Negative feedback is potent and damaging to your brand reputation. Therefore, capturing emotional information helps you understand your customers’ feelings about why they particularly like or dislike your app’s offering or service. Sourcing the correct data is instrumental in you deciding which actions to take to improve your customer satisfaction rate and customer brand loyalty.

So what customer feedback is most valuable to us, and how do we acquire it?

What is customer sentiment?

We call customer sentiment the feelings people go through when engaging with products like yours. Your app business needs to understand your customers’ different emotions while using your product, identify their pain points through user feedback analysis, and promptly address them.

Consider customer sentiment as a critical indicator of general feelings toward your overall brand. Are they positive, negative, or neutral? When collecting feedback, getting your customer base to provide ratings and asking the right questions helps you identify their opinions. And crucially, what you need to be doing to improve their experiences!

Sounds logical, right? Let’s explore what conducting customer sentiment analysis looks like in more detail and how you can use it to your advantage

How do you conduct customer sentiment analysis?

Firstly, it is critical to understand a few recording methods and collate accurate customer feedback. After all, you want to be using the most precise information you can—whether that ends up being positive or negative.

The following are some of the most effective ways app businesses find out their customers’ true feelings about what they are getting:

• Live chat functionality—Effective for direct issue resolution and recognizing common factors leading to positive feedback and pain points your users face.
• Chatbot functionality—Automating your feedback collection through a chatbot is efficient in streamlining issue diagnosis and recording data on all types of customer experiences.
• App user reviews—Collate customer reviews on Google Play and the Apple Store using an automated tool like AppFollow and break down the specific data you need.
• Online surveys—Having your users complete surveys via SurveyMonkey or Google Forms, for example, is beneficial. These tools also allow you to export responses in CSV or XSL files.
• Social media—Conducting feedback analysis is accessible through social media platforms like Twitter. Developers pull data from an API, and you gain real-time insights through tags, comments, and posts from new, existing, and legacy customers.
• Monitor app ratings—Your latest app service offering will receive immediate feedback via App Store reviews and ratings. Curate this data, use it for customer sentiment analysis, observe possible reasons for customer churn, and update your product accordingly.

Particular SaaS tools like these work to help app businesses record and store analytics for sentiment analysis:

• Amazon Comprehend
• Google Cloud NLP
• MeaningCloud
• AppFollow

As we will see, customer sentiment analysis is essentially an automated process—the purpose is to highlight where things are working and what needs your immediate attention.

How to measure customer sentiment 

Some of the above customer feedback methods invite detailed but complex responses and resulting data. Customer sentiment analysis models utilize Natural Language AI and other algorithms to source trends in the text and sort customer entries into three distinct categories—positive, negative, and neutral.

Filtering the data into measurable insights helps you find actionable solutions to problems far more efficiently. Consequently, you can offer more positive experiences people are looking for from your app—which can only be a good thing!

What are the key metrics of customer sentiment analysis?

While customer sentiment is a qualitative metric, all data, including other quantitative KPIs, provide statistics directly indicative of overall customer experience. Your app business must be aware of the influence all of these metrics have on customer sentiment and brand reputation:

• Voice of customer (VoC) — VoC encompasses the textual data collected from all touchpoints and feedback methods you’ve undertaken. Use it to improve your app performance, help to meet your users’ needs, and improve customer LTV.
• Customer satisfaction (CSAT) — How happy your users are with the service your app offers them.
• Net promoter score (NPS) — How your app ranks compared to competitors and overall brand loyalty in your user base.
• Customer effort score (CES) — How quickly you reach issue resolution without the user’s assistance.
• Sentiment Score — the app's overall user satisfaction score. The percentage is calculated based on the correlation between positive and negative reviews.

The importance of tracking customer sentiment

Okay. So we now understand what customer sentiment analysis is and how to carry it out. But why is customer sentiment so crucial to numerous businesses today? All brands want to improve customer experiences and increase their profit margins, but there are a few ways customer sentiment analysis impacts app companies specifically.

Increased app store ratings

Tracking customer sentiment will help you improve your services and customer relations. If your customers are happy with your app service and have a positive relationship with your brand, then there is a likelihood they will leave you great reviews and ratings in the App Store. As these ratings are publicly visible to everyone, higher ratings will encourage more people to download and use your product.

Improved app product or service

Forecasting industry trends is key to your growth and success, so customer sentiment will help you find new opportunities to explore and identify flaws in your current offering. The insights you’ll get from customer feedback analysis could help you break into emerging markets, develop new products, or enhance your existing services.

Higher return on investment (ROI)

Use customer sentiment analysis to identify how customers feel about your product or service. Also, analyze your competitors’ products and use the acquired insights to inform the direction you want to take in your subsequent product launches.

Customer sentiment analysis can completely transform your fortunes by helping you analyze the problems with your app service on a granular level and helping you to eradicate problems.

How AppFollow provides a way to track customer sentiment from app reviews

We combine semantic customer analysis with our automation tools to help you find your users’ most valuable feedback without sorting through the thousands of spam, one-word, or repetitive reviews. You can also view a breakdown of reviews flagged as junk or offensive in some cases, which are removable from the public domain.

AppFollow designed its services to quickly identify customer sentiment, simultaneously filter out non-useful clutter, and nurture your customer relations with capabilities such as bulk-replying to highly positive app reviews.