Using online review data as shopper insights

In this article, we'll cover ways to extract actionable shopper insights from online reviews, and how this can benefit your business and accelerate your marketing efforts.

Gathering shopper insights

Deciphering Trends

To gather the most compelling data, you need a sizeable sample that can be observed over a long period of time. Consistently collecting reviews is key. Once you have the sample, you can transform the raw data into valuable shopper insights, as illustrated below.

Graphing average rating and quantity of reviews side by side will also provide you with a better understanding of when customer sentiment was at a high/low. For instance, when one large company compared the same periods, year over year, they found that there was a significantly greater quantity of reviews. In order to stay actively engaged with all of these customers, the company saw the need to hire several full time employees to analyze the review content, interact with consumers leaving reviews and manage any concerns that may come up. With these changes, the company realized faster response time to reviews allowing for quicker escalation of problems and higher overall customer satisfaction. Regardless of the size of the business, reporting can help garner insights.

With enough data, your business can analyze your business performance for the same periods over several years - the discrepancies can be very telling.

Analysing shopper insights

We always encourage our partners to respond to their reviews whether the reviews are positive or negative. The most valuable information comes from the meat of the reviews - not merely the star rating. That being said, most businesses don’t have the time to read through hundreds of reviews - and even if you do, the results are often unquantifiable.

However, if you know what to look for, every review will contain a nugget of valuable information. If you’re able to quantify the content of hundreds of reviews - you might notice that the majority of your customers are experiencing late shipping.

While responding and resolving the issue for individual customers is important - it won’t fix the underlying issue, and you might not even recognize that there is one.

One example of how you can figure out the “bigger picture problems” is using shopper insight analysis to see which words are most frequently used, broken out by the rating of the review:

By adding keywords to the analysis, you can make note of which rating specific words are most commonly found. For instance, if the keyword “website” appears in a significant portion of your one star reviews, it suggests you should investigate the user experience on your website.

It might be a small issue that’s having a larger, ripple effect. Identifying specific areas is made simpler with this tool. One of our partners knew they were receiving negative reviews, but didn’t know what was making the customer unsatisfied. They realized they were getting poor feedback related to shipping, and determined that their shipping service wasn’t the issue - the shipping times just weren’t clearly communicated during the checkout process. Once they fixed that, customers were proven to be quantifiably happier with their shopping experience based on the impact measured after the changes were made .

On the opposite end of the spectrum, your business can also determine your biggest successes. The above example depicts a company where the words “easy” and “help” are associated with positive ratings. This company is therefore likely providing a user friendly, positive, and helpful customer experience.

Determine which keywords are most relevant to your industry, and your branding. Specific keywords can range from what the industry calls their workforce (i.e. masseuse or flight attendant) to the items/services sold. Once you determine what your customers are talking about, you can be most effective in your analysis of what’s working and what isn’t.

To operate as a successful business, it’s important to keep track of your customer feedback. Being able to quantify the difference in customer sentiment and keywords commonly used, can provide the shopper insight to constantly improve your business and beat your competitors.

Using these reports will also allow your business to determine whether a policy or service change was effective. After a corrective measure has taken place, your business should see an inverse correlation between mentions in 1-star related views and other higher ratings.

When your business has improved their services and business product, one would imagine there will be a positive kickback - in sales and future reviews, drawing a larger audience to your business.

Collect valuable shopper insights

Lastly, you can analyze the times during which customers are posting their reviews:

his is an easy way to determine when consumers are actively engaged, and learn the optimal times and days to send invitations, marketing materials, and promotions. The information you learn from your reviews can and should be used to help optimize your other channels as well, increasing response rates and engagement with your business.

Conclusion

Trustpilot has been distributing this report to dozens of customers on a monthly basis; reach out to your Success manager to see about adding this to your solution and start looking at what your reviews are trying to tell you. Many of our partners have recognized the possibilities of deeper engagement with their Trustpilot reviews and many more are being exposed to these possibilities every day.

Whether it be through this tool or another, understanding customer feedback is of paramount importance to improving business practices, measuring success internally and growing your business.