Review data provides valuable insights into your customers’ experiences, preferences, and opinions. Managing and analyzing this data helps your organization understand what customers like and dislike about your products and services, allowing you to improve and tailor your offerings to meet customer needs.
What Comprises Review Data?
Your organization’s review data includes online reviews and ratings about your business locations, products, and services. This data may be captured from multiple business review sites as well as from your social listening activities. It may also include unsolicited feedback and reviews from employees who are rating your company as an employer.
Managing and analyzing review data helps your team gather actionable insights into the customer experience. These insights can then be used to improve operational performance, brand perception, your product/service offering, and, ultimately, the customer experience.
Your Review Data: Structured and Unstructured
Reviews offer a combination of structured and unstructured data. Structured data from feedback and reviews is often clearly defined and easy to report on. Examples of structured review data types include customer name, age, location, income bracket, transaction ID, star rating, survey score, and NPS score and label, among others.
Unstructured data, meanwhile, refers to types of information contained in reviews that don’t have a specific, predefined data model or structure.
- According to IBM, as much as 80% of all data today (including enterprise-relevant information) is unstructured.
Text data is often a significant portion of unstructured review data. Examples include free-form text found in reviews, social media posts, additional comments in survey responses, and even video reviews.
Today’s top brands are leveraging both structured and unstructured review data in order to dig deeper into the customer experience, find patterns and trends, and uncover information and insights about customer sentiment, tone, emotion, and motivation.
Why Analyze Review Data?
Why is it important to analyze data from reviews, ratings, and customer feedback? Whenever customers review your business locations, they share information more valuable than what you’ll ever get from star ratings or satisfaction scores. It’s beneficial to crystallize this information into insights — helping you achieve a more accurate, complete, and unified view of the customer.
Identify Trends and Patterns
A number of natural language processing tools and technologies can bring to the surface the most relevant keywords used by your customers in their online reviews. These tools analyze your review data and help your organization make sense of massive amounts of feedback while aiding you in the discovery of specific trends and patterns that define your customers’ experiences.
Understand Customer Sentiment
Analyzing review data also allows you to pin down customer sentiment, emotions, and feelings. Sentiment analysis tools provide measurement of positive and negative language, with great accuracy. This helps your team see more clearly than ever what customers like and dislike about your brand.
Steer Product Development and Innovation
Online reviews and other forms of unsolicited feedback often contain suggestions that can steer innovation within your company and inspire new product ideas or improvements to existing products. Review data can be a valuable source of inspiration for product development and innovation and, when used effectively, can accelerate improvements and breakthroughs for your business.
Create Messaging that Resonates
Your team can also harness review data to build a brand that resonates with your customers. By digging deeper into the information contained in online reviews, you can discover topics, issues, and keywords that customers mention organically, then tailor your brand identity and messaging so that the voice of your brand speaks the language of your customers.
Improve Search Performance
Review data also impacts your company’s search engine rankings and online visibility. A steady of stream of positive reviews can do wonders to improve your brand reputation while also making your brand more discoverable to potential customers.
Final Thoughts
Managing and analyzing review data is essential for companies looking to achieve a better understanding of their customers. By enabling data-driven decision-making, review data also helps businesses improve their products and services, build a strong brand reputation, and stay competitive in the market.
