People’s lives across the globe have been disrupted and impacted in unprecedented ways due to the current COVID-19 pandemic situation. The spread of this pandemic has meddled with the lives, livelihoods, communities, and businesses worldwide. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has forecasted that the COVID-19 induced economic loss could go up to $8.8 Trillion, i.e., 9.7% of global GDP. The International Labour Organization (ILO) has pointed out that more than 400 million full-time jobs have been wiped out globally due to this pandemic.
Source: https://medium.com/@TheDataArtist/creating-wordcloud-from-twitter-feed-using-r-370f509275af
This pandemic has also brought in a unique set of social and economic challenges that have emphasized the actual value of identifying a business’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as recognizing and mitigating associated risks. At this critical juncture, organizations around the world have pushed themselves in innovating solutions to limit the economic disruptions and put them back in the path of recovery. In order to do that, it’s critical for the organizations to empathize with their customers at the emotional level. In this post, we shall discuss the importance and ways of understanding customer emotions during these times.
Importance Understanding Customer Emotions
With most of the customers restricted within their homes due to the COVID-19 lockdown, delivering experiences and services that meet their new needs with empathy and care would be the influencing factor in the survival of the business during this pandemic. The companies that are capable of delivering the same would create a long-lasting positive customer experience thus leading to better customer retention and sales.
Currently, the key challenge for marketers is to get a pulse on the customer preferences in real-time and rapidly innovate to optimize the product and identify the customer journeys of the target segment. In order to achieve the same, along with agility and responsiveness, organizations must also ensure that their decisions are backed through data and real-time research.
Ways to Understand Customer Emotions
The traditional marketing channels have gone obsolete during this pandemic, and the marketers have had to rely solely on digital channels for insights to influence their target audience. The following are the sources that can be leveraged to efficiently understand the customer’s emotions.
- Search Queries
Google, the leading search engine that processes around 70,000 searches every second and 5.8 billion searches every day. All these searches are customers trying to find solutions for their problems. That is a lot of data that can be leveraged in driving business results. A systematic keyword research shall help in understanding the following.
- Who is your Target Audience
- What are their Areas of Interest
- What are their Needs
- What is their state of mind
Analyzing the search queries provides insights on the customer’s emotions and needs and adds more value to the business.
- Social Sentiment
Social media has become a prominent digital platform where customers voice both their concerns and satisfaction about the product or service. Text mining the social media posts of the target audience and performing sentiment analysis on the same provides valuable insights about their current emotions. These relevant insights help in identifying product/service gaps and anticipated features that can be funneled to improve the customer experience leading to better business growth.
Setuserv’s Customer Review Insights and Signal (CRIS) platform can help businesses in improving their marketing content reflecting customer’s emotions and needs based on the automated search query analysis, and also perform sentiment analysis that helps in a deep understanding of their customers and market ecosystem. Read more about the CRIS platform here.