Sentiment Analysis Tools: A Guide to Data-Driven Success

Emotions play a huge role in consumer behaviour. When businesses go the extra mile to connect with their customers, it resonates. Tuning into the sentiments of a target audience helps a brand understand how they feel, and ultimately, influence what goes in their shopping carts. 

As one of the most important drivers of decision-making, businesses must find ways to listen to their audience, dissect the various emotions, and create value. Sentiment analysis should be at the forefront of every marketing strategy. 

There has never been a better time for businesses of all sizes to lean into this way of thinking. The power of technology and artificial intelligence (AI) means sentiment analysis tools are readily available. By leveraging these tools, you can unlock insights that can quickly shape how you market your products and services. 

In this article, we’ll check out what is sentiment analysis, and we’ll showcase its relevance and benefits to modern businesses. Once we’re through, you will have a better grip on how best to use sentiment analysis tools to better align with your customers and reach your business goals. 

What is sentiment analysis?

Sentiment analysis is the process of examining and analysing large chunks of digital content to determine the emotional opinions toward a brand or message. 

What does this mean?

Modern businesses have access to an incredible amount of data, through email lists, customer support messages, reviews, social media interactions, surveys, transcripts, and more. Sentiment analysis examines this information and contextualises it, giving businesses a conclusion as to where their reputation stands in the eyes of the customer. 

Companies may then use this information to create insights and findings to better understand customer experiences. In turn, insights are used to inform future strategic decision-making to improve these experiences.

Simply put, sentiment analysis helps you determine how people feel about something, whether it’s a brand, advertisement, business, or otherwise. 

A little later, we’ll go through real-world examples to show you what sentiment analysis looks like in practice.

What is a sentiment analysis tool?

A sentiment analysis tool is AI-powered software that sifts through data to compile the general sentiment toward your business. 

For example, a sentiment analysis tool may use natural language processing (NLP) to study the context behind social media posts and reviews to provide feedback on how your business is performing according to customers. Essentially, this process works similarly to humans, but works on a much larger scale at a faster rate.

Some sentiment analysis tools can process voice or even video, again, using AI to pick up on tone, facial expressions, and other important cues that provide a clearer idea of how people feel about a business or topic. 

Sentiment is typically categorised as:

1. Positive
2. Neutral
3. Negative
4. Mixed

When dealing with a large customer segment or target audience, you could have thousands of comments, conversations, and mentions to go through. With a large digital presence (i.e. multiple websites, social networks, and review platforms), you’ll require significant analysis. The reality is, this can’t be done efficiently without the help of a tool. 

Customer sentiment can change in an instant so real-time tracking is essential. Sentiment analysis isn’t a once-per-year process; it’s ongoing. 

Below, are some examples of how you can use sentiment analysis tools to measure and track your customers and target audience continually. 

• Call and voice analysis: Get instant analysis, feedback, and insights on all customer support calls. 
• Social listening: Monitor real-time follower opinions on your brand, services, campaigns, and other content from social media. 
• Text analysis: Automatically analyse text-based feedback from multiple sources, such as reviews, social media interactions, surveys, and emails. 
• Competitor analysis: Compare your brand sentiment against industry benchmarks and other competitors. 
• Feedback analysis: Categorise information from opinion surveys, third-party tools, and other online resources to gauge what areas customers would like to see you improve. 

Sentiment analysis example – Huel

Virtually all major brands use sentiment analysis tools to gauge customer feedback and adjust campaigns. 

For example, McDonald’s scrutinises key details across its 40,000-plus worldwide locations to come across potential issues with menus, new releases, or inconsistencies. This positions them to quickly address problems with staffing needs, increased quality standards, or supply chain problems, helping with consistency and maintaining customer loyalty. 

Another excellent example comes from the British company, Huel. Huel is a nutrition brand that sells nutritionally complete food in alternative forms, like powders, bars, and drinks. 

One of Huel’s key performance metrics is net promoter score (NPS). It measures how likely a customer is to recommend a product, service, or brand to a friend. NPS is calculated from a survey featuring a series of scale questions, which they score from 0-10. Once the survey is completed, the NPS score is given as a number between -100 and 100. 

Huel used Netigate to create NPS surveys and communicate with customers. The system allowed them to alter how they approach NPS and customer feedback. With Netigate, Huel changed their strategy completely. Instead of sending one-off questionnaires, Huel engaged customers at various stages of the buyer journey, contacting them at key order numbers.

Not only was Huel able to gain a better understanding of how the brand was viewed by customers, but it also increased its NPS by 10 points. To boot, Netigate’s flexible approach led to a 164% increase in survey responses worldwide, giving the data even more significance. 

Note: These graphics are for illustrative purposes only and do not include the actual figures from Huel’s sentiment analysis campaign.

Sentiment analysis example – CASIO

CASIO is a leading electronic goods manufacturer in Japan. It is known for its watches, calculators, cameras, and musical instruments. As a multinational brand, CASIO understands the importance of feedback on products from both its customers and retailers. 

CASIO Europe uses Netigate to create separate surveys to gauge customer and retailer feedback. It not only gathers information about its products, but it also collects relevant personal details, providing key insights on the target audience. 

This has allowed CASIO to hone in on the demographics of its target market, adjusting its median age. Using the data, it made a decision to change its communication approach and adjust advertisement placements to save costs. 

Essentially, CASIO leveraged Netigate as a research tool to enhance communication and modify its advertising strategy. As an established brand, its use of sentiment analysis is completely different from Huel, which is still trying to find its footing in a relatively new industry. 

This demonstrates the scope of what you can achieve with a sentiment analysis tool.

How Sentiment Analysis Benefits Businesses

Sentiment analysis tools go beyond collecting feedback. They translate it into actionable insights, helping you make customer-driven, data-backed decisions with confidence.

By identifying trends, addressing challenges, and uncovering opportunities, these tools empower businesses to improve efficiency and foster deeper customer connections. Ultimately, they ensure that customer voices are not just heard but drive meaningful improvements, setting the stage for long-term growth and success.

Below, are some business-specific ways sentiment analysis can benefit your business. 

Clearer customer insights

All successful companies care about how they are perceived by customers. Furthermore, they measure this perception in multiple ways. However, the process is painstaking, resource-intensive, and expensive. 

With AI-powered customer sentiment software, barriers are eliminated. With feedback tools, such as Netigate, data can be analysed at scale very quickly. This provides businesses with key insights that align with their chosen performance indicators (KPIs), whether they are NPS, CES, CSat, or otherwise.

It has never been easier to identify and improve on your target market’s pain points and expectations. Insights may be acted on immediately, with tweaks to an existing strategy. Or, they can be withheld strategically to be implemented in future campaigns. 

Leads to better customer service

Customers no longer trust brands as much as they did in the past. In the information era, consumers are aware of alternatives and aren’t afraid to shop around. This doesn’t mean that they’re more price-sensitive. Other factors influence brand loyalty, with customer service being an important decider. 

40% of customers state they would no longer purchase from a brand after two poor customer service experiences. Conversely, 59% of customers would consider recommending a brand because of their customer service.

These reasons alone demonstrate the importance of providing value to consumers that goes beyond products and services. Hence, businesses are relying on sentiment analysis to get a deeper understanding of what customers say and think about them.

This is a proactive approach that allows businesses to make key adjustments to their customer service, in turn, boosting client retention and helping them grow. A customer-first policy is essential in modern business.

Empowers the right marketing adjustments

Communication and customer relationships are responsibilities that often lie with marketers. After all, the majority of messaging goes through advertising channels, like social media, TV ads, or physical in-store promotions. 

Sentiment analysis removes a lot of the guesswork for marketing teams. Rather than hoping a message hits the right nerve, marketers can rely on data and insights to make sure copy, imagery, packaging, and other key details resonate with the target market. 

This data-driven strategy doesn’t have to be reserved for the introductory stages of campaigns. Sentiment analysis may also be used to test how an advertisement or message is received. From here, marketers can act with confidence to make adjustments to a message. 

Enhances product development and innovation

Sentiment analysis tools have wide-ranging capabilities apart from gauging the general opinion of your brand. You can also use it to hone in on specific products and services. This is especially beneficial in the development stages. 

For example, if you launch a new product or service feature, consider using sentiment analysis to determine how well it’s being received. This could be done with a custom survey from Netigate or for more specific feedback, via phone calls. 

Early feedback is essential to identify glaring issues or potential bugs. By catching problems before they grow, you can offset a backlog of future concerns that could lead to a crisis. A proactive approach will also look good from a customer perspective.

Superior competitor analysis

Focusing on customer opinion toward your brand should be the priority. However, this doesn’t mean you should ignore the competition. Use sentiment analysis tools to track and analyse competitor mentions. This will give you a totally new set of insights and ideas for gaining an edge. 

The depth of analysis is your choice. If a competitor has a range of products and services similar to yours, you could analyse the sentiment toward each. How necessary this is depends on your specific situation. 

Over time, the marginal gains made from performing competitor analysis can lead to significant revenue growth. You can even use the information to create comparisons with your competitors for your website.

How to use sentiment analysis

Using a sentiment analysis tool involves more than just hitting a button and receiving feedback. Making the most out of a program means transforming raw data into actionable insights. This requires a strategic and structured approach. Here’s how to unlock the full potential of your sentiment analysis tool to better understand and service your customers. 

Set-up and integration

The first step is to set up your account and check that it’s running properly. Netigate have seamless set-up processes so you’ll be up and running quickly. If you need help, you can consult their customer service teams or watch a tutorial video. 

Both tools allow integration with other systems, such as your CRM or customer support tools.  Take time to configure these integrations and input key details to align the tools with your business goals.

For example, you might design surveys to measure your NPS or define metrics for specific focus areas. Proper setup ensures the tools work effectively to deliver actionable insights.

Feedback collection

Once you’re up and running, the next step is feedback collection. Netigate’s feedback tool is intuitive and allows you to create multiple surveys in a range of categories. You have the option of developing custom surveys from scratch or using templates Netigate allows you to preview templates to make sure they fit the bill. 

If you opt for a template, you are free to add and remove questions. This is a useful feature as many businesses just want a template as a starting point. 

All questions within the survey are identified by a tag. These are important identifiers as they hone in on specific information that will eventually inform your results. 

For public surveys, you’ll want to create a survey loop. Essentially, this means when the survey is complete, it automatically refreshes to the start again. When a respondent is finished, it will jump to the beginning again, making it easy for the next person to begin. 

To make the survey easier, you may want to add a summary box. For example, if you ask numerical questions about how much a customer spends on various categories, you can add a Total box, showing them their total spend according to the answers. 

Netigate also allows you to share live results from answers or votes. The results are displayed live as each question is answered. 

When creating your surveys, include question types that align with what you’re trying to uncover. For example, if you want to gauge customer loyalty or general sentiment, NPS questions may be best, such as, “How likely are you to recommend our service to a friend?”

To gain feedback on a particular feature or process, you might choose a customer satisfaction score (CSAT) question. This could be something as simple as, “How would you rate our checkout process?”. Respondents would choose from a range of options, from “Very unlikely” to “Very likely”.

Once your survey is ready, distribute it through multiple channels (e.g. email, SMS, or embedded links) to reach your audience effectively. Tracking progress ensures you gather sufficient data for analysis.

In addition to the standard survey creation process and features, Netigate offers a variety of features, which you can get more details on here.

Get the right results with analytics

When you’ve collected feedback via Netigate surveys, the next step is to analyse the data. This is when you use a sentiment analysis tool, like Netigate, which is part of the broader Netigate ecosystem. 

We help your business convert the raw data from survey responses into categorised feedback. It can also import customer feedback from other sources, like social media, online reviews, support calls, and more. 

With this information, Netigate goes to work, processing the language and analysing the data with its propriety AI to identify if the sentiment is positive, negative, or neutral. 

Additionally, it allows you to break down the feedback into specific themes, campaigns, or issues, helping you better identify urgent focus areas. 

This detailed approach makes the prioritisation of tasks a quick and painless process.  

You can transfer the survey results directly to Lumo, mitigating the need for manual data input. This automation ensures the feedback is immediately available for analysis, helping you save more time and reduce the risk of human error.

Actionable insights

When the feedback has been analysed, turning the findings into actionable insights is an essential step. This is where value becomes truly apparent. 

Before we go into Netigate’s unique approach, it’s important that you fully understand what insights actually are. 

Insights refer to actionable interpretations drawn from analysed customer feedback. They go beyond raw data and standard metrics by identifying patterns, trends, and areas of impact that help you understand customer sentiment, improve experiences, and drive decision-making. 

For example, an insight might reveal what product features are generating the highest dissatisfaction rates among buyers. 

Netigate’s generative AI-powered tools make this process seamless by providing actionable recommendations based on feedback. One of its standout features is its ability to rank and prioritise insights according to its weighted impact. See the graphic below for an example of how it differentiates itself from other analysis tools. 

This ensures high-quality feedback from key segments. You can create an action which can then be assigned to any member of the team to deal with. Track the progress of this action through the Events page until it is complete and the loop has been closed. 

We can help you identify and categorise sentiment drivers. For example, if a specific keyword typically generates 2,000 forms of feedback in a week and one particular week, generates double, the platform will highlight this trending sentiment driver. 

If the sentiment driver happens to be negative, it offers specific actions to resolve the issue.

Whatever insights you gather, Netigate allows you to align them with organisational goals, and implement targeted actions to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Tips and best practices

As we mentioned earlier, sentiment analysis is an ongoing process. To help you stay consistent and continually uncover valuable insights, we’ve outlined a list of proven best practices.

• Define clear objectives: Declare precisely what you want to achieve with sentiment analysis, such as improving your NPS or refining your marketing strategy. 
• Use quality data sources: Rely on tools, like Netigate, to create quality surveys and source reliable feedback. 
• Engage customers at important stages: Look for feedback at various stages of the customer journey to gain actionable insights relevant to all customers. 
• Integrate tools with existing systems: Before you start collecting feedback, integrate your existing CRM and support platforms for streamlined data collection and analysis. 
• Prioritise insights: Leverage tools to prioritise high-impact insights that significantly affect customer experience and influence ROI. 
• Act fast: Don’t dwell on insights as the market can change very quickly. Use Netigate’s recommendations to take action and solve customer problems at speed. 
• Monitor trends over time: Keep an eye on large-scale market shifts to stay ahead of the curve. 
• Train team members: All team members may have access to the account at no extra charge. Equip team members with the necessary skills by training them and refreshing them on how to operate the tool effectively.

Conclusion

Keeping all of your customers satisfied all the time is an impossible task. But, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. Netigate exist to bridge the gap between customers and companies, helping you identify pain points and find solutions to them. 

Regardless of the size or nature of your business, data and intuitive reports can make big differences. They help you streamline your decision-making processes, giving you the confidence that what you’re doing is customer and data-led. 

Sentiment analysis tools don’t just offer raw data, they provide insights and feedback at scale. This allows companies to uncover trends, address concerns directly, and identify opportunities for growth. Tools enhance decision-making and boost efficiency while strengthening customer relationships and ensuring their voices are heard. 

Rather than taking notes on this article, why not begin putting the learnings into practice? Check how you can book a demonstration with one of our experts for free. We’ll take you through the key processes and give you even more details on how sentiment analysis can help your business. 

For further information on visit our suite of services, check out this page.