Listen to the hidden voice of your customers: Why e-commerce should go for customer review analytics
E-commerce has long been my topic of interest before I started my career 4 years ago. Back then I was working for a global brand and was part of the e-commerce team for a new online product. After the product launch, one of the key emphases in my daily work was to listen to our customers through various kinds of channels and collect useful user feedback for product improvement. This experience has benefited me a lot in terms of understanding e-commerce in practice and recognizing the importance of customer reviews to brands.
Last year I decided to make a transition in my career in order to bring together my interest in data analytics and e-commerce. To fulfill this transition, I started my master’s program in Business Analytics last year at UC Davis. And I was so honored when engaged in the practicum project of this program, in which I teamed up with 6 classmates to work with a company that specializes in offering analytics solutions to e-commerce sellers. Till now the project has been on for 4 months, and I was able to gain some practical insights into e-commerce data analytics that I want to share with you in this article.
Utilizing effective tools to manage your product reviews
As an e-commerce manager, one thing you definitely want to be clear about is the health condition of your product listings. Besides all the sales data, focusing on the product reviews may also give you some indications of the product status. Now the question arises: how to keep track of thousands of reviews for your hundreds of products and keep alert of the potential signals for status change?
Be Proactive in review management
Negative reviews are almost inevitable for every brand. So what you can do as a seller is to react quickly to save your brand image for the most. While some leading brands choose to build review management systems in their data analytics departments, software and service solutions are available for small to medium-sized businesses.
However, there is no easy plug-and-play approach. Solutions out there in the market are often not integrated, so sometimes it is hard for a brand to purchase a “right” combination of solutions. On one hand, analyses from different third-party platforms may not be coherent and thus may cause confusion for decision-making. On the other, purchasing services from several ends may increase costs within the organization. So, it is crucial for online sellers to identify their needs and choose the most cost-effective solution.
How?
Reviews do impact sales and contribute to the long-term positioning of your brand. You can never be too proactive to understand your customers and build positive impressions through review management. Here are several tips for you:
- Pay attention to extreme feedbacks
Research shows that reviews are often very skewed. Over 67% of reviews on Amazon are five stars. Reviews are only left when customers have really strong opinions towards a product they bought. So you want to be extremely alert when negative reviews appear — especially when they increase in a period of time. This may indicate changes in product qualities (QA failures), or even vicious competitions (an influx of fraudulent reviews caused by competitors).
- Utilize tools to filter reviews and set timely alerts
To prevent public perception issues and preserve your brand’s reputation, review analytics tools can be used to seek out the reviews that affect your product the most. Such a service can help you identify which reviews are authentic and which are fraudulent. Besides, a live trend of recent review states can also be summarized so that timely alerts will be sent once abnormalities happen.
- Transform negative experiences into positive ones through interaction with your customers
One step forward, to deal with negative reviews from customers, brands need to show empathy. React quickly and expressing your understanding can tell your customers you care about them. With proper followups, a bad experience can be transformed into a good one and long-term relationships can be yielded.
The last word
Customer experience is essential for e-commerce businesses. By implementing advanced review analytics into daily practices, brands can support sustainable growth in their products as well as customers’ confidence.
