Can customer sentiment impact firm value?

Developing measures to capture customer sentiment and securing a positive customer experience is a strategic necessity to improve firm profitability and shareholder value. The paper considers the relationship between customer satisfaction, earnings, and firm value as these drives change in stock prices, customer, and investor sentiment. The present study investigates the impact of customer sentiment polarity on stock prices based on Indian automobile sector databased such as the Indian Nifty Auto SNE (Maruti Suzuki, Tata Motors, and Eicher). A top-down approach is adopted to construct a financial proxy-based sentiment index completed with sentiment extracted from automobile news and customer reviews. The paper uses a text mining approach to holistically measure customer sentiment's impact on investor sentiment and stock prices. The study was initially performed at the overall individual stock from the Nifty Auto NSE but focused on the top three passenger vehicle manufacturing companies i.e., Maruti Suzuki, Tata Motors, and Eicher. It was found that the sentiment index was augmented with news and customer reviews allows predicting more accurately NIFTY AUTO stock price movements. This implies that customer sentiment is a major driver of investor sentiment which in turn impacts the stock market and the firm value. Thus, the present study is an integrated approach to holistically measure customer sentiment's impact on investor sentiment and stock prices.