With the growing popularity of the Internet and social platforms, what else has grown proportionally are opinions and feedback.
But today, the opinions and feedback are not limited to social platforms as businesses have also recognized their power in building brands. Yes, these play an important role in many ways, including the NPS survey.
This research method of quantifying customer satisfaction and loyalty can be made more deep-diving by adding a technique called sentiment analysis.
So, let's look at how sentiment analysis and NPS are related and how they help businesses better understand their customers by analyzing their emotional text inputs.
What's NPS: Key to Shaping Business Strategies
Net promoter score is a globally used metric to measure customer loyalty and satisfaction. It is a single-question-based survey that asks questions that tend to gauge the likelihood of the customer recommending the brand's product or service to others, such as family and friends. Customers define their answer by replying with a number out of a rating scale of 0 to 10.
From a business perspective, it's really useful in shaping business strategies. With the NPS score and the other data it gives, like the number of promoters, detractors, and passives, you can create data-driven paths for your business to earn more customer loyalty by better satisfying them.
Decoding Sentiment Analysis: Language of Emotion
Let's now learn about the concept of sentiment analysis. By its name, you can guess that it's a technical term, so yes, it's a data processing technique that helps in the technical analysis of non-technical data input made by humans.
In simple terms, it analyzes humans' comments and feedback and categorizes them into three categories: negative, positive, and neutral.
These three categories represent different human behaviors and emotions, such as criticism, appreciation, and more. But what about its output? How does that look? The output of sentiment analysis comes out in the form of value on a scale of -1 to 1.
This spectrum of -1 to 1 represents extremely negative emotions or behavior on one end, i.e., -1, and extremely positive on the other end, i.e. 1.
This technique is very helpful because it turns a set of instructed data into structured data. In the world of data analysis, it's well known that structured data is not only easier to process but also gives you more actionable insights that are simpler to understand.
So, this is what sentiment analysis is. But now there's another question that may knock your brain cells: how are net promoter score and sentiment analysis related to each other? So, let's address this question in the next heading.
The Relationship Between Sentiment Analysis and NPS
Sentiment analysis plays an important role in bridging the gap between a customer's NPS score and the motivation behind that score. Yes, net promoter score is undoubtedly a great metric for understanding how satisfied and loyal your customers are, but the problem lies in identifying what's causing the problem in case of a low NPS score.
Here comes the role of it, which analyzes customers' feedback to understand the reasons behind their scores. It helps businesses understand the problem-causing elements in a detailed manner, allowing for pinpointing solutions to the problems.
Let's take an example to better understand the relationship between sentiment analysis and NPS. Here is feedback from a customer from a restaurant he visited yesterday.
Feedback:
"I rated it a 7 because, overall, my experience at your restaurant was pleasant. Firstly, I appreciated the friendly and attentive service from the staff. They were polite and accommodating, which made me feel welcomed. Additionally, the ambiance of the restaurant was cozy and inviting, providing a comfortable atmosphere for dining.
However, there were a couple of areas where I felt there could be improvement. Firstly, while the food was good, I found it to be a bit overpriced for the portion sizes. I think offering more value for the price would enhance the dining experience. Secondly, the wait time for my food was longer than expected, especially considering the restaurant wasn't very crowded. It would be great if you could work on reducing wait times, as it can impact the overall satisfaction of customers.
Overall, I enjoyed my visit to your restaurant, but there are some aspects that could be refined to make it even better."
As we can see, the customer has rated a 7, meaning he's a passive customer, and the brand should make him a promoter in order to increase the NPS. After the sentiment analysis, if the feedback is like what you can see above, the restaurant gets a rating of -0.7. This rating is derived by taking the positive and negative buzzwords into account.
In the above example, “Firstly, I appreciated the friendly and attentive service from the staff. They were polite and accommodating, which made me feel welcomed.” and “Additionally, the ambiance of the restaurant was cozy and inviting, providing a comfortable atmosphere for dining.” are the sentences where positive buzzwords can be seen as appreciated, friendly and welcomed.
On the other hand, “Firstly, while the food was good, I found it to be a bit overpriced for the portion sizes. I think offering more value for the price would enhance the dining experience.” and “Secondly, the wait time for my food was longer than expected, especially considering the restaurant wasn't very crowded. It would be great if you could work on reducing wait times, as it can impact the overall satisfaction of customers.” These are the sentences where negative buzzwords can be highlighted, like overpriced and the wait time was longer than expected.
As the restaurant looked at the rating and feedback, it implemented strategies to make things better. They increased their portion sizes and also implemented a new and enhanced working methodology. Moreover, they hired more staff, like chefs and waiters, to decrease the wait time.
As a result, the NPS of the restaurant rose significantly in the next six months. With this example, you can understand how sentiment analysis and NPS are related, and acting on sentiment analysis helps improve the score. So, now let's list the benefits of sentiment analysis in enhancing NPS, which a business gets with its implementation.
Benefits of Using Sentiment Analysis and Improving NPS
Provides Actionable Insights
By analyzing sentiment in net promoter score feedback, businesses can identify specific areas of strength and weakness. Positive sentiment highlights what customers appreciate, while negative sentiment points to areas that need improvement. It enables targeted action plans to enhance customer experience.
Promotes Personalization Strategy
In businesses operating today, preparing for better personalization is a key focus. Personalization is becoming crucial day by day as customers like it when a brand comes up with something more aligned with their needs and wants. This helps here by understanding customers' expectations. While identifying improvements is important, identifying needs and wants leads to better customer communication, which is undoubtedly crucial for any business.
Identifies Future Trends
Customer experience is like a building, which you build from scratch and then maintain to keep it as it is. That's why you can't leave looking at what's going on with your customer's experience. But isn't it better to address the upcoming problems in advance? Yes, it is, and with sentiment analysis, it's possible as well. It helps you point out any issue that has started emerging and can go mainstream soon so that you can work on it before it worsens things.
Also Read: Navigating the Future: Customer Experience Trends for the Upcoming Year
Competitive Advantage
With it in NPS, businesses can gain a competitive edge. By being updated about customer sentiment, you can continuously refine your offerings based on customer feedback, which will ultimately drive customer loyalty and advocacy.
Conclusion
To sum up, sentiment analysis is powering businesses with the words of their customers, which often go unlistened. While the NPS survey is undoubtedly a breakthrough for quantifying customer satisfaction and loyalty, sentiment analysis makes it even more descriptive and insightful. Its benefits, ranging from customer understanding to trend identification, make it of great use in any organization looking forward to becoming more customer-oriented.