Utilizing Product Reviews for Consumer Intelligence
In the age of interactive and personalized marketing, customer intelligence is no longer a luxury. As a result, brands go out of their way to obtain legible customer data and use it as a basis for their marketing campaigns. Among these metrics, product examinations are highly valued.
They offer a peek into the customer’s preferences and allow brands to adapt and make changes to their offerings based on the majority’s opinion. However, reviews may not always be genuine, which prompts an important question:
Can you reliably obtain consumer intelligence from product reviews?
Product Reviews – The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
In theory, product reviews might seem like the perfect tool. After all, it provides an inexpensive method to obtain an honest opinion from the user who has used your product. Indeed, this method can have no downsides until you realize that about 30% of online customer reviews could be fake.
However, one could argue that online reviews are still invaluable due to the user volunteering information about the product that can help the company make decisions. Not to mention, there are other benefits of online reviews, such as:
- It allows you to understand if the overall response toward your product is good or bad.
- It enables you to understand what makes the competitors stand out.
- It saves significant money on outreach programs.
Despite the number of fake reviews floating around, the benefits of customer reviews far outweigh the problems. So, how do you incorporate it into your customer intelligence plan?
The Role of Online Reviews in Customer Intelligence
As the name suggests, customer intelligence relies on obtaining information about the demographic utilizing your products to make certain adjustments or work on the feedback. Usually, brands have to go the extra mile and increase their outreach to obtain genuine feedback. They depend on tools like website analytics, surveys, and customer behavior records to learn the public’s perception of their products.
Now, imagine if users volunteer this information. For instance, if user A claims that they did not like a specific feature associated with the product, it might not be a general perception. However, online reviews often have a system to like or reply to a user’s comments. Based on the number of likes or responses to a particular comment, it is easy to guess how many individuals echo the same sentiment.
Since many review websites require the customer to register to leave a comment, you can leverage it to obtain relevant information about the customer. For instance, their age and gender might be visible upfront, allowing you to peek at your target demographics. You might also get a hold of the customer’s preferences through their review, allowing you to understand their buying habits better.
Despite these benefits, accessing reviews from hundreds of websites can be cumbersome to gather meaningful data. But the advent of multiple companies specializing in collecting data from all over the internet has made it easier for brands. As a result, obtaining significant consumer intelligence from product reviews is easier than ever!
Final Thoughts
Just as every coin has two sides, every metric has advantages and disadvantages. Despite the influx of fake reviews in the online space, customer reviews are integral to understanding the general sentiments towards your product and making alterations to improve the perception of the product among consumers.
