How to analyze customer sentiment to improve customer experience

Customers expect brands to listen and engage. According to The 2025 Sprout Social Index™, 73% of social users agree if a brand doesn’t respond on social, they’ll buy from a competitor. As a business, you need to deliver great customer experiences while keeping up with these changing demands.

Part of that equation is understanding how customers think and feel about your brand. That’s what sentiment analysis is all about. By tracking and interpreting customer sentiment, you gain the insights needed to refine your strategy, strengthen relationships and stay ahead.

By the time you’re done reading, you’ll understand how to measure sentiment and how to use it to improve customer experience.

What is customer sentiment?

When a customer comments on a post or shares a photo about your brand, they’re expressing a sentiment, such as joy, frustration or disappointment. This is customer sentiment—the emotions behind your voice of customer (VoC) data.

AI-powered sentiment analysis does the heavy lifting, transforming what would be hours of manual review into practical insights.

Sprout’s Smart Inbox and Social Listening enable you to monitor these emotional signals in real time. With the help of tools like these, customer sentiment becomes your compass, guiding you toward more authentic response strategies and better brand experiences.

What is customer sentiment analysis and how do you measure it?

Customer sentiment analysis (or opinion mining) is the process of measuring how customers perceive your products, services and brands by using AI tools powered by machine learning and sentiment analysis. Analyzing customer sentiment data empowers you to respond more quickly and anticipate shifts in brand perception before they occur.

Sentiment analysis is like a temperature check on perception, revealing whether your audience is hot (positive), cold (negative) or room temperature (neutral), and why. That temperature reading will give you a clearer picture of the customer experience and provide insights you can use to warm up your customers.

Consider how the Atlanta Hawks used sentiment analysis to refine their social media strategy. Using Sprout’s Tagging feature, they documented which content types and themes resonated with fans, helping them tailor their content more effectively. This data-driven approach led to a 127.1% increase in video views and a 170.1% growth in their Facebook audience over a three-month period.

Measuring sentiment seems tricky, but AI marketing tools make it possible. Sprout’s AI automates this entire process, analyzing thousands of comments across multiple platforms in moments. Beyond identifying sentiment, it connects these insights with your CRM tools, giving you a comprehensive view of how customers feel throughout their journey with your brand.

Keep reading to learn different sentiment analysis methods and how to turn insights into action.

The benefits of customer sentiment analysis

Here are six ways AI-powered sentiment analysis enhances customer sentiment and experience:

Monitor and improve customer satisfaction

Negative sentiment is often a sign that something isn’t working. Research shows customers are more likely to leave feedback when they’re dissatisfied than happy. That means if you’re not monitoring sentiment, you’re missing key insights into what needs improvement.

Sprout’s sentiment analysis tool combines social listening and review management, giving you an up-to-date snapshot of sentiment and trends in a single dashboard. By tracking shifts in sentiment and spotting patterns in neutral or negative comments, you can quickly identify issues and take action before they escalate.

For example, Google used sentiment analysis to pinpoint growing frustration over spam-filled search results. In response, it rolled out a major update to improve search quality and customer satisfaction.

No brand loves getting negative feedback, but sentiment analysis turns it into an opportunity. By surfacing what’s broken faster, you can make informed decisions and improve the customer experience.

Resolve issues faster and reduce support backlog

Like a pot of water on a hot element, dissatisfied customers will only wait so long for a reply before they boil over and take their business elsewhere. Sentiment analysis tools, like Sprout, can prevent this from happening.

Sprout’s Smart Inbox uses sentiment analysis to automatically prioritize incoming messages and reviews by sentiment, saving your support team time and guesswork. This reduces wait times and prevents tickets from piling up.

Identify product and service gaps

Tracking sentiment reveals opportunities to improve products and services.

For example, Indiana University used Sprout’s solution to identify a major student pain point: parking frustrations. By monitoring social conversations, they identified recurring complaints about permit costs, availability and construction-related issues. The social team reported their findings to leadership, initiating a broader discussion about the problem.

By identifying these gaps and fixing them, brands gather more positive reviews, attracting more customers. A study found that 58% of consumers would pay more to support a company with good reviews.

Trending topics and sentiment analysis are both incredibly valuable on their own. But together, they show you what customers love and where you can refine your offerings.

Reduce churn and build brand loyalty

AI-powered sentiment analysis empowers you to help unhappy customers right away.

 Sprout’s Reviews Feed pulls all your reviews from different sources into one stream. From there, you can filter by sentiment and respond to negative reviews immediately, reducing churn.

Sentiment analysis tools also identify opportunities to engage positively. When your customer care team answers questions and provides timely, personalized responses to happy customers, like the response you see below, it builds brand loyalty.

By leveraging sentiment analysis to tailor customer service, brands can repair lost trust, exceed expectations and make customers feel valued.

Enhance personalization and customer interactions

Salesforce found that 66% of customers will switch brands if they feel “like a number rather than an individual.”

The fastest way to frustrate a customer with your reply is to make them feel like you’ve just copied and pasted a templated response. Sentiment insights tell you how customers feel so your customer care team can match their energy and go beyond surface-level engagement.

Sprout’s sentiment analysis, combined with tools like Smart Inbox and Social Listening, make this effortless. By automatically detecting tone and emotional context, it helps your team craft replies that feel empathetic rather than robotic.

From there, your customer care team can engage with personalized responses rather than canned replies, proving they’re paying attention. Features like Saved Replies make it easy to scale personalized engagement by giving your team a library of adaptable responses so customers feel heard, not handled.

Gain real-time customer insights to inform strategy

Sentiment analysis can help you capture instant feedback during product launches and campaigns. This allows you to react promptly, preventing issues from snowballing.

For example, let’s say a video game company drops a new game and monitors social media and gaming forums for player reactions. Within hours, they detect a pattern of complaints about a difficult level, which is causing players to lose interest.

Acting on these real-time insights, the company releases a patch to adjust the difficulty settings and posts tips for navigating the challenging sections. By doing so, they prevent early negative reviews from damaging the game’s reputation.

Brands use customer sentiment analysis to improve their marketing, business and customer care strategies. Want to see how top companies do it?

Here are 3 examples of how to leverage sentiment analysis to gain customer insights.

Factors that affect customer experience and customer sentiment

Customer experience is how people feel as they interact with your brand. Did they have such a great experience they’re going to tell everyone? Or did the experience leave them feeling differently about your brand?

Here are a few key factors that influence perception and loyalty.

Product quality and pricing

Customers expect products to match their price and promised value. When experiences don’t align with expectations, it creates cognitive dissonance, which can lead to negative sentiment if not addressed.

The 2025 Index showed consumers favor brands with high-quality products, proving that marketing alone can’t compensate for poor experiences.

Take Starbucks, for example. The brand is known for its creative beverages, customizable options and premium pricing, which means customers expect consistency with every order.

In one instance, a customer commented that their local Starbucks matcha drink didn’t taste as expected. Starbucks quickly responded with an explanation for the inconsistency. In doing so, the brand showed they take customer concerns seriously.

 

Customers want to be able to depend on brands. This example shows that when brands take feedback seriously, they have a better chance of keeping customers satisfied.

Response time and customer care

When it comes to customer care, first response time matters. Almost three-quarters of consumers expect a response on social within 24 hours or less (a trend that has remained steady in our Index reports from 2022 and 2023).

Sprout’s Smart Inbox brings all your social messages into one place, so no inquiries get overlooked. With sentiment tagging, your team can spot urgent issues faster and jump in before a small concern becomes a bigger problem.

Prioritizing thoughtful and fast interactions, especially when addressing complaints, helps build trust and keep customers engaged.

Brand messaging and engagement

When campaigns resonate, they’ll lift positive sentiment; when they miss the mark, they’ll confuse or even alienate the audience. Having a sentiment-driven marketing strategy is key to customer loyalty.

Customers want to feel seen and understood. Your brand’s communication (tone and consistency) and interactions with customers on social media shape perception.

Sephora analyzes customer sentiment to see what excites its audience. Then, it adjusts its promotions and messaging to match, creating more relevant experiences and building deeper customer loyalty.

Sprout’s sentiment analysis tools help you stay in tune with your audience at every stage of the customer journey. By tracking how sentiment shifts from awareness to purchase to post-sale engagement, you can adjust your messaging to keep customers engaged every step of the way.

How to measure customer sentiment

How do you accurately measure customer perception? It starts with gathering data from a wide range of sources. Relying on just one channel can create blind spots and lead to skewed insights.

Here are the best ways to measure customer sentiment.

AI tools to analyze and measure customer sentiment

A single review is like one star in the sky. Sprout’s sentiment analysis tool helps you zoom out, see the whole night sky and recognize the constellations that shape it.

Instead of getting caught up in one-off comments, you get a holistic view of how customers feel about your brand across social media, reviews and online conversations, all in one place.

AI-powered sentiment analysis makes sense of massive amounts of data, using natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to categorize sentiment as positive, negative or neutral. It’s like mapping the night sky, revealing the patterns and trends that shape your audience’s perception over time.

Sprout gives you a continuous pulse on sentiment enabling you to track the customer experience lifecycle. When sentiment shifts, you’ll know immediately and can adjust your messaging, fine-tune your service and strengthen relationships at every touchpoint.

Curious how Sprout’s sentiment analysis tool can level up your business and social strategy? Watch the video below to see it in action.

Social listening tools

Social listening data provides the foundation for sentiment analysis. This is why our tool gathers data from Facebook, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, Tumblr and the web, tracking keywords, hashtags, brands, industries and multimedia content. Then, using features like sentiment analysis, Sprout turns raw data into actionable insights.

Here’s what you can use social listening to do:

• Measure share of voice to see how your brand stacks up against competitors
• Conduct a campaign and competitor analysis to refine your strategy
• Monitor events and trending topics to stay ahead of conversations
• Research audience preferences for better targeting
• Identify emerging trends before they gain traction
• Gather industry insights to inform decision-making
• Track customer feedback to improve products and services

If you need some help, Sprout’s Recommend by AI Assist suggests keywords to refine your listening.

Sentiment analysis software to analyze text

Sentiment analysis software pulls text from social media, review platforms, news sites, podcasts, surveys, customer service interactions and other sources together, processes it and assigns a sentiment score to summarize the findings.

Sprout’s sentiment analysis software calculates sentiment scores by using neural networks and large language models (LLMs) to analyze text. By learning from labeled data, it weighs words, phrases and emojis to deliver a probability score for positive, negative or neutral sentiment.

Plus, Sprout’s tool has built-in native multilingual sentiment mining, so if you get comments in multiple languages, they are organically translated, analyzed and included in your sentiment score.

You could compile and analyze text manually and assign it a sentiment. However, sentiment analysis software does it more quickly, accurately and at scale, than would be humanly possible.

Surveys and net promoter scores

Sometimes, the best way to understand customer sentiment is to ask the customer what they’re thinking. Brand surveys and net promoter score (NPS) surveys help brands measure customer satisfaction and loyalty by capturing feedback straight from the source.

An NPS survey asks questions like, “How likely are you to recommend our brand to a friend or colleague?” And customers respond on a scale from 0 to 10, making them promoters (9-10), passives (7-8) or detractors (0-6).

With Sprout’s Advanced plan, you can send customer feedback survey requests through X replies, Instagram and Facebook private messages.

You can even add a feedback question to understand the ‘why’ behind their rating, which usually isn’t included in an NPS survey. Sprout’s sentiment analysis software will then process this feedback and incorporate it into your sentiment score.

Integrating sentiment analysis with NPS data lets you pinpoint the underlying factors affecting customer satisfaction.

Customer reviews and feedback monitoring

Ask for reviews and direct feedback to gather unfiltered insights into customer experiences. Whether it’s a five-star product review or a frustrated comment on social media, every piece of feedback helps you gauge sentiment and spot areas for improvement.

Sprout’s Review Management feature centralizes reviews from platforms like Google My Business, Facebook, TripAdvisor and Yelp, making it easier to track sentiment trends across locations and industries. Our review reporting uses sentiment analysis to summarize the health of your review scores, making monitoring easy.

If you’re looking for an all-in-one social media management platform, Sprout offers sentiment analysis as part of its AI-powered social listening capabilities. Our solution gives you a holistic view of customer sentiment and makes average sentiment and sentiment trends easy to understand by providing visual summaries.

See it for yourself by scheduling a demo to learn more.

3 steps to analyze customer sentiment

Now you know what to look for. But how do you go about analyzing this data? Follow the three steps below for a systematic and organized approach to conducting sentiment analysis.

1. Gather the data

First, you need raw material to work with—that means collecting brand-related information from every corner where your customers might express their thoughts.

This could range from online reviews and social media posts to customer support tickets and survey responses. Gathering diverse data sources ensures you get a well-rounded customer sentiment analysis, rather than isolated snapshots.

2. Process the data

Next, you’ll need to sift through the data and prepare it for analysis.

This is where sentiment analysis tools can help. AI-powered algorithms sort positive from negative, and suss out those tricky neutral comments.

This step involves decoding the tone and intent behind words, which requires sophisticated technology, like natural language processing (NLP), to capture subtleties and context.

Using an AI-powered social media management tool with social listening capabilities like Sprout can help with gathering and processing customer sentiment. And with a noise filtration option, you can refine your results even more to filter out spam or irrelevant content based on your Listening Query.

3. Visualize the data

Finally, you’ve got to make sense of all this information. Data visualization tools, like those in Sprout, turn raw data into charts, graphs and heat maps that highlight trends and patterns.

This step is crucial because it translates complex data into a format that’s easy for teams to understand and use, turning insights into action points for improving customer experience.

You can visualize sentiment through:

• Overall sentiment score with classification
• Related keywords and hashtags
• Sentiment overview on specific social media channels
• Sentiment overview by data source (text, tag, media type, etc)
• Sentiment trends by country, region and other demographics
• Changes in sentiment over time

How to use customer sentiment insights to improve CX

Here’s how to transform customer sentiment insights into actionable steps that will elevate your overall customer experience.

Take advantage of AI and social listening

Let’s say a traveler books a five-star hotel because they want a luxury experience. If they find their experience doesn’t match the cost, it will likely lead them to either leave a bad review or post about their disappointment on social media.

If the hotel had Sprout’s social listening tool with sentiment analysis, it would be able to see the trend in negative sentiment and take it as a sign to improve its customer experience.

Social listening offers insights you can use to:

• Fine-tune your offerings
• Adjust your pricing strategies
• Deliver on customer expectations (meet or exceed)
• Shape marketing campaigns
• Make decisions about product developments or updates
• Understand common pain points

Continuing with the hotel guest example above, imagine they arrive to find an outdated room, mismatched amenities and slow service.

Using social listening, the hotel could listen and gather data to reveal recurring complaints so they can address the most pressing problems negatively impacting the customer experience.

Using this information, it could decide to redecorate or remodel the rooms and improve staff training. Because the hotel’s decisions were backed by data, these are investments that it can be sure will lead to customer satisfaction and higher customer sentiment.

Understand common pain points

Continuing with the hotel guest example above, imagine they arrive to find an outdated room, mismatched amenities and slow service.

Using social listening, the hotel could listen and gather data to reveal recurring complaints so they can address the most pressing problems negatively impacting the customer experience.

Using this information, it could decide to redecorate or remodel the rooms and improve staff training. Because the hotel’s decisions were backed by data, these are investments that it can be sure will lead to customer satisfaction and higher customer sentiment.

Optimize customer care

Improving customer care comes down to personalization. According to The 2025 Sprout Social Index™, consumers say companies should make personalized customer service their #1 social media priority in 2025.

More personalized service leads to higher customer retention and increased lifetime value. AI customer service solutions, like Sprout’s AI Assist, can help scale personalization without losing the human touch.

If the hotel in our example used Sprout, it would write a response to the hotel guest based on the message’s sentiment, which is marked automatically, then use Enhance by AI Assist to tailor the tone and length of the reply in a couple of clicks.

Knowing the customer’s history with your brand also helps when personalizing a customer care response. Our AI-powered sentiment analysis tool includes Summarize by AI Assist, a feature that generates short summaries of past interactions over 800 characters, giving your team instant context so they can respond faster and with more empathy.

The result? Stronger customer relationships, better retention and a measurable impact on ROI. To see how personalization can drive business value, explore Sprout’s ROI toolkit.

Humanize your brand

People connect with people. To build trust, brands need to show a more human side and embrace authenticity, which is where influencer marketing comes in.

Consumers trust influencers because they create authentic, relatable content that feels personal. Research shows that this parasocial relationship makes audiences see influencers as trusted voices, strengthening the persuasive impact of their recommendations.

A Q3 2023 Sprout Pulse Survey found that over 80% of marketers consider influencers a key part of their social media strategy. By partnering with influencers, brands can build more genuine connections with customers.

Sprout’s collaboration with Vin Matano, an influencer agency owner, showcases this in action. His story about Sprout’s Influencer Marketing platform felt authentic, positioning Sprout as a supporting character in his journey while staying true to his style.

Using customer sentiment analysis, you can track how your audiences react to influencer partnerships and refine your approach. Influencer management solutions, like Sprout, help you find the right influencers, ensuring you confidently reach the right audience.

Promote positive customer stories

A compelling customer story is worth its weight in gold, but finding it can be challenging.

Enter: Customer sentiment analysis. Since it categorizes everything by sentiment, it makes it much easier to find user-generated content made by happy customers. From there, you can amplify these satisfied customer stories in your marketing by highlighting their testimonials.

It’s a win-win-win. You get authentic content that strengthens your brand, your audience sees that their voices matter and the customer gets a moment in the spotlight.

Continuously measure sentiment and iterate

What customers love today might frustrate them tomorrow. If you are committed to improving customer experience, you need to revisit your sentiment analysis data regularly. If you stay on top of it then you don’t have to catch-up when issues arise.

Netflix is a prime example of what’s possible when you use social listening to track audience sentiment and spot emerging trends. By analyzing online conversations, Netflix identifies popular genres, content gaps and shifting viewer preferences. These insights shape their content strategy, informing what shows to greenlight, how to market them and even what formats to explore.

Creating a continuous feedback loop, like Netflix, enables you to get ahead of expectations and give your people what they want.

How to choose the best customer sentiment analysis tool for your business

The right sentiment analysis tool will do more than just categorize feedback by emotion, it’ll help you make smarter decisions, faster.

Here’s what to look for.

Prioritize AI and NLP capabilities

The way we express sentiment is highly nuanced, and sarcasm or mixed emotions can be difficult to interpret, even for AI. That’s why it’s important to choose an AI-powered tool, like Sprout’s, that goes beyond basic keyword detection to analyze entire phrases and complex sentences for more accurate sentiment insights.

But it doesn’t stop at detection. Sprout’s AI helps you make sense of sentiment by turning it into insights you can act on. Whether it’s spotting hidden frustration in customer feedback or identifying rising enthusiasm around a campaign, these insights help you fine-tune your messaging and connect with your audience.

Look for social media and multichannel monitoring

The best tools track sentiment across multiple platforms.

You want something like Sprout’s social listening tool. It pulls sentiment from the largest social media networks, review sites and other multimedia sources. Everything is streamlined into one dashboard, making it easier to spot trends, analyze feedback and take action without jumping between platforms.

If you want a 360-degree view of customer sentiment, Sprout gives you the tools to monitor, understand and engage, no matter where the conversation is happening.

Assess real-time analytics and alerts

One viral post, a product launch or an unexpected issue can change brand perception overnight. Sentiment-based notifications, like Sprout’s Listening Spike Alerts, help brands stay ahead.

They enable teams to manage crises proactively and leverage positive sentiment rather than scrambling to react too late.

Check scalability and speed

As your brand grows, conversations about your business will too.

A tool that can’t keep up with large volumes of data might lead to delays in identifying critical sentiment shifts.

Look for a sentiment analysis solution that can process thousands of mentions per second without sacrificing accuracy. Sprout’s listening tool processes up to 50 thousand posts per second and an average volume of 600 million messages a day (according to a Forrester report on The Total Economic Impact™ of Sprout Social).

Ensure it integrates with your tech stack

Sentiment analysis needs to fit seamlessly into your tech stack otherwise you’ll be wasting time toggling between windows. For example, Sprout integrates with customer support and CRM platforms such as Salesforce, connecting sentiment insights with real customer interactions.

How to improve customer sentiment

Analyzing sentiment is just the beginning. You need to use what you learn to make customers fall in love with your brand.

Here’s what to do.

Define the scope

Before you can improve sentiment, decide where to listen. Are there specific regions or languages that need attention? For instance, if your product is hitting a new market, you’ll want to tune into that area’s local review sites and social networks.

Defining the scope provides a targeted area for your efforts so you don’t cast too wide a net and dilute your impact.

Monitor the sentiment

Next, use sentiment analysis tools to continuously monitor these channels. By tracking sentiment over time, you can spot trends and understand how customers are reacting to every little change.

For example, if sentiment dips every time you release a software update, there’s a clue to improve your change management process.

Identify the topics or themes

Leverage AI to figure out what’s really stirring up emotions. Is it your stellar digital customer service, or perhaps shipping delays are causing grief? Sprout’s Tagging feature will be helpful for this, enabling you to categorize messages containing customer feedback by topic.

Identifying these topics helps you know where to double down and where to pivot. For example, if multiple customers express frustration over a specific product feature, that’s a clear signal you need to make improvements.

Create a strategy

Finally, develop a strategy based on these insights. Allocate your resources where they’ll make the biggest difference. Maybe it’s time to staff up your customer service team or invest in an AI chatbot to provide instant responses.

Also, determine the best channels for customer interaction on social—perhaps your audience engages more on Instagram than email—and tailor your approach accordingly.

Sentiment analysis is a game-changer for customer experience

Customer sentiment analysis can directly influence your brand’s growth and success. With the insights sentiment analysis can deliver, you’ll get inside your customers’ minds, figure out their emotional triggers and create experiences that surprise and delight.

Schedule a personalized demo to learn how Sprout will help you drive real business growth.