It’s pretty difficult to imagine a world without reviews. Not many of us walk into a shop and make a purchase without browsing at least a handful of online reviews beforehand.
In fact, a study from TrustPilot found that almost 9 out of 10 customers consult online reviews before buying.
Though these reviews are incredibly helpful to consumers, for business owners, trying to use reviews to guide the product development process or improve the customer experience can be a bit of a headache.
In this article, we’ll reveal the importance of consumer ratings & review analysis for your business and how to analyze the data.
What is Review Analysis?
Review analysis is the process of turning unstructured customer and product ratings and reviews, which have been collected from a variety of channels, into structured data. Then the information can be used to assist decision-making and improve developed products and services.
An analysis of Amazon reviews, for example, might advise a digital camera manufacturer to create a more ‘thorough’ instruction manual for their new line of camera models if they discover their customers are getting confused when setting up the camera.
Why is it Important to Get Customer Feedback Analysis Right?
Review analysis can also grant you more insights into what your customers like and dislike about your brand and products, enabling you to develop more effective marketing strategies.
This process could also help you identify any customer complaints before they affect your sales and brand image. Using review analysis is a great way to listen to your customer’s feedback and improve things that your customers value. If you want to keep customers for a long time, work to improve the areas where they have trouble with your brand.
Some benefits of ensuring a proper review analysis within your organization include, but are not limited to:
- Improves the customer experience: It’s difficult to develop experiences and products that will keep customers coming back to you if you don’t know what they think of their interaction with you. Review analysis lets you dive into your customer experience journey and quickly improve their experiences.
- Resolve obvious and hidden product bugs or service issues: If your customers are facing an issue with your product, they will often leave a review discussing these issues. Doing an analysis of your reviews can help you act on these issues and find solutions.
- Improves new product development: Instead of creating new products on a whim, review analysis can be the first step of your product development cycle. Enabling you to create products that your customers will love. In fact, 56% of customers say they stay loyal to brands that “get them”, customer reviews can help you “get” your customers.
The general steps in review analysis are first, finding a solution provided, particularly a text analytics tool, that can save you time, money, and resources. Then, secondly, allowing it to gather any type or number of reviews from about anywhere. Third, analyze the insights shown to you, usually via a single dashboard, and share or report your insights.
Sources for Collecting Feedback
Some common places where you’d want to source your reviews from include:
Review sites: Any customer can leave a review on sites like Trustpilot, Amazon, and App Stores about their goods and services. Since they are not part of a company, you can trust that the reviews are real and not heavily slanted in one direction. They usually have a lot of information, so there is a better chance of gaining insights.
Social media: Customers often leave reviews on social media sites, so it’s important to keep an eye on them. These reviews can spread quickly and could be seen by many people. They can also have a big effect on people who might buy something. Where your customers leave reviews will depend on who they are, but Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok are all common places.
Support conversations: Conversations with support staff are the best way to determine what customers think. Support ticket logs (from emails, phone calls, and live chats) are the best way to get unbiased, qualitative feedback from customers.
Survey results from NPS and CSAT: Most of the time, NPS (Net Promoter Score) and CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) are used to get customer feedback. AI-powered sentiment analytics is a powerful way to determine what causes people to feel good or bad on a large scale. But NPS surveys often give biased feedback, so you’ll have to work hard to ensure your results are useful.
Review requests: You can ask your customers for reviews in many different ways. These can come in the form of emails, phone calls, or requests on your website. It’s easiest for your customers if they can leave a review in the same way they usually do. If they are in the app, send the request there. If you have to email them to let them know their order has shipped, you can add a request for a review at the end.
How to Analyze Reviews with Wonderflow’s Wonderboard
As the VoC software market is relatively new, your options for the best customer feedback management solution provider aren’t so overwhelmingly vast. In fact, the most advanced one is powered by artificial intelligence technology, which not only collects and analyzes your reviews but reports them in a consistent and timely manner.
And these reliable, accurate insights can also be unified (all in one platform), shareable with relevant departments, and predictive. Just like Wonderflow. Here are general steps on how easy and quick it can be to use an AI-based sentiment analysis tool like our Wonderboard to analyze your business reviews.
Step 1: Explore your data
After configuring your new sentiment analysis tool and allowing it to source and analyze your reviews, you can explore the results. One of the strengths of the Wonderboard is that it translates unstructured text into easily readable and comparable numbers. So, the first thing to do is to explore and analyze those numbers.
And this is valid whether you have a very specific business question in mind or if you simply want to understand what is going on in your market and with your brand at a general level. By exploring the numbers, you can easily spot differences, trends, outliers, etc., which you can further investigate in order to plan how to act on those insights.
Let’s imagine, for example, that you want to understand how your brand performs compared to your competitors. In just a couple of steps, you can already have a clear idea of what the answer is.
Below we are comparing some of the major smartphone brands, and if you were a manager at Redmi, you would immediately realize that your brand has a lower performance compared to your competitors (lower Rating and Sentiment Index).
Top smartphone brands comparison by KPIs and Topics – Source: Wonderboard
That’s probably due to the quality of the picture of your devices since you have a higher percentage of negative comments on this topic and a lower percentage of positive ones. And all that’s done in just two clicks!
Additionally, looking at the key metrics and sections within the Wonderboard allows you to identify further what’s relevant to analyze very quickly. Every new number you look at will guide you in building a story with your data and getting actionable insights on how to leverage customers’ reviews.
Step 2: Analyze the Voice of the Customer and Even Predict the Impact on ROI
But numbers are just one side of the coin. It’s always important to understand what customers are saying exactly and which words they are using.
The numbers help you focus on the right priorities, but looking at the real customers feedback will always enrich your understanding of the matter. And again, that’s very easily done through the Wonderboard since in each and every section, you can click on any topic, and you will immediately see everything that customers say about that specific topic.
To look at an example of a different product category, an analysis for an Air Humidifier shows that a product had a specific issue with Size. But, in fact, reading the reviews, we found out that the problem is not about the “size” per se.
It was about the discrepancy between what is shown through online photos and the actual size. Here’s a real customer’s review you would see on the dashboard:
“It’s smaller than what appears in the pictures, but great!”
“Too small! The pictures don’t do justice!”
“The product I received was half the size of the one shown in the picture.”
So, for this specific example, the Product Manager wouldn’t have to change the specific air humidifier model but just be more clear on its dimensions and advertise on its packages and digital ads with more ‘realistic’ photos.
And it is this type of knowledge that you can only get by reading behind the numbers. By listening to what your customers are saying.
Step 3: Find out how much your rating can increase by letting the AI predict
Once you have gone through the previous steps, you will have surely identified if there are any issues to be solved with your products and what they are. Now the Wonderboard can bring you one step forward and tell you exactly how much your rating would increase if you solved those issues.
This is done through our Predictive solution, a proprietary algorithm that considers all the aspects that customers talk about, either positively or negatively, and the final rating and calculates the expected increase in customer rating.
For example, a Smartwatch has a rating just below 4 stars, 3.99, and its main issue is about the Connecting Performance with the Smartphone, with customers complaining particularly about the Bluetooth connection:
“Did not find mobile app very good. Did not like app UI very much, sometimes it doesn’t connect with Bluetooth instantly”
“Used for about a week, and now the watch does not connect anymore. Used multiple phones, and the connection failed successfully. The Bluetooth of the watch does not work”
Analyzing the 9.813 reviews for this product, the Predictive analysis tells us that if the manufacturer managed to solve that issue, the device rating would increase from 3.00 to 4.05, going above the 4 stars threshold, which would bring a significant impact on online sales.
Now that you’ve learned the importance of implementing a quality review analysis process and examples of how to analyze them using today’s advanced technologies like our Wonderboard go on over and book a free demo to show us how it’s done in detail.
