So You Have Customer Reviews: 6 Best Practices to Put Them to Work
Customer reviews are good for a company’s soul.
You might not always feel this way as you’re monitoring the reviews that roll in about your company from all manner of customers, trolls, and competitors masquerading as customers. Often, this exercise has a way, for the unprepared, of making you feel like you’re eight years-old again and taking shots from all the mean kids on the playground. But the idea is that, if companies can get past their initial gut reaction to reviews (especially negative ones), they can find in reviews the secret sauce to becoming a better, even superior, company. This is a subject that I’ve hit on in the past, but without really digging into the crucial question: How is this to be done?
How do companies learn to systematically turn those cringe-inducing reviews into positive internal change?
In this article, I would like to dig into this very question, drawing on some of the examples I’ve found from the few companies who are really embracing this idea to outline six best practices of companies pursuing customer review-driven change:
1. Treat reviews like you treat other data
Most enterprise companies have really bought into the virtue of data — marketing analytics, financial data, operational data, Big Data. We’ve all become amateur statisticians, obsessing over the validity of data, and investing millions in making sure these numbers are pristine. And for good reason: when collected and analyzed with discipline and exactness, numbers can reveal a company’s next big cost-saving strategy or a source of untapped value.
Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for how we collect and use data from customer reviews.
“Let’s be honest, the ways people use to collect it are not thought through like they should,” points out Conrado Langer at Business2Community. “From annoying guys with clipboards knocking on your door to spammy messages in your inbox, research is carelessly planned by most companies.”
In companies looking to make better use of customer reviews, so much of the hoped-for change starts with the quality and clarity of the information pulled from those reviews. Sadly, most companies view reviews on a one-off basis, as one unrelated anecdote after another, just one customer with a problem. If they’re worth their salt, they will solve that customer’s problem, but even the best companies fail to then take things a step further and record and quantify that customer’s problem.
For instance, online retailer 1SaleADay.com recently received a negative customer review from a law enforcement officer concerning the site’s credit card pocket knife. In the review, the officer publicly scolded the retailer for selling what he or she saw as product that could help criminals and promised to dissuade others from buying from them. Their first reaction was probably exactly what you and I would think first: take it down.
But then they had the good sense to step back and consider the possibility that the opinion held by the officer was an outlier.
“From a financial perspective it was important for us to survey our consumers to ascertain whether this particular consumer’s sentiment was more widespread,” said the company’s chief communications officer, Eliyahu Federman. “We decided that if the reaction to selling the knife was overwhelmingly negative, we would reconsider whether to sell this product because it would hurt our bottom line by alienating existing customers.”
Any company serious about using reviews to improve the way they provide services and products would do well to think this way — to not just listen to reviews in an arbitrary, anecdotal way, but to start taking those reviews and breaking them down consistently, uniformly into quantifiable data. Start asking, “How can we turn reviews into data reliable enough to then guide earth-shaking decisions at the company level?”
2. Use reviews as a springboard into a longer conversation
So you’re probably wondering, Did Federman’s instincts pay off? The company took to social media to invite their hundreds of thousands of Facebook fans to sound off on the issue. Not only did the vast majority of respondents agree with their decision to list the credit card pocket knife, but they also expressed appreciation at being included in the decision-making process. 1SaleADay.com had the data they needed to confidently keep the product listed on the site.
But perhaps the more important takeaway here is how jazzed the customers were about being asked in the first place — they wanted to be considered, to be brought into the conversation.
There is no unwritten law of customer feedback that it has to be unilateral, with the customer barking orders and companies scampering off to fulfill their desires. On the contrary, customers seem to relish the experience of being talked back to by companies and engaging in longer discussions about how companies can do better.
Almost certainly, this means that a typical one-paragraph review and a one-line response from your social team is not the ideal. If customers want to talk with you more, find opportunities to create and draw them into longer-form discussions.
Not only are these longer interactions great for building customer loyalty, but they’re also much richer in the quality of data gathered.
3. Don’t keep it to yourself
Some companies actively fight customer reviews. Others accept and respond to them as a matter of good customer service. But the flow of information usually stops in the customer service department, never to be shared with anyone else in the company. And if the rest of the company is in a constant state of ignorance, it follows, they can’t use that feedback to improve the way they operate.
Sales guru Anthony Iannarino echoed this when he said, “[N]egative feedback on your performance, whether it comes quarterly, annually, or even informally, can help you identify the changes you need to make in order to perform better.”
In other words, if you’re serious about using customer reviews to improve, your customer service has to be geared to collect and share customer review data with the rest of the company.
4. Put structure in place to act on reviews
The importance of making this process a company-wide affair can’t be overstated. Why? Because when you receive a review, you’re not just receiving information about a single customer or a single instance. You’re learning something about how your whole company is working. Negative reviews tell you that, somewhere, there is a break in your system.
Too many companies put responding to reviews into the hands of one department or sometimes, sadly, just one person. This one department or person may be capable of putting out the individual fires but usually lacks the reach and political clout to eliminate the source of these fires.
Smart companies that are succeeding at using reviews to guide company improvement don’t leave this up to a single department or person. They make it a company affair, often assigning the task of turning customer review data into action to teams of individuals plucked from across the company and usually led by an executive with the clout to push changes through.
In this way, they are putting the structure and the power in place to give change a chance.
5. Recruit reviewers to the improvement effort
Many successful companies are not satisfied with one-time conversations with customers, but are actually bringing reviewers in to act as consultants in their change efforts.
For example, McDonald’s recent “Create Your Taste” campaign invited customers to be part of the creative development process and gained their loyalty in the process.
French cafe chain Le Pain Quotidien recently began a program of inviting customers who had given them negative reviews to act as product testers, of sorts. Every month, over 100 of these product tester are given gift cards to the chain, where they are encouraged to dine and then fill out an online survey about their experience.
The result: Le Pain Quotidien is receiving invaluable, nearly constant feedback from their most discerning customers. A nice side effect: these customers no longer hate the company, but see themselves as partners in its success.
6. Close the loop
And this brings us back to soliciting feedback from the customer. Once you affect change in your company based on customer feedback, it’s wise to go back to customers and get their feedback on the change. If you’ve followed tip #5, you already have these customers close at hand. Ideally, once this cycle of feedback, analysis, reaction, and feedback has begun, it should never stop.
