The Future of Consumer Reviews: 5 Predictions

Frankly, the current state of consumer reviews is one of turmoil.

On one hand, thanks to the democratizing power of the Internet — and review sites and social media, in particular — consumer reviews have never been a more powerful force in the relationship between companies and consumers. For just a hint of how great this influence has become, peruse this sampling of stats:

• A Bazaarvoice study discovered that 39% of in-store shoppers research products reviews online before buying from a physical store.
• A study of Google data by SEOMoz discovered that 67% of consumers were influenced by online reviews.
• A Marketing Land survey found that 90% of consumers’ buying decisions were influenced by online consumer reviews.
• A BrightLocal survey found that 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends and family.

Yes, consumer reviews have arrived, but this prominence has also attracted a good deal of criticism — and some of that criticism has raised some issues that must be resolved before consumer reviews can reach their full potential, like:

• They’re too easily faked
• Even when they’re real, they can be inaccurate
• They’re difficult to turn into actionable data

So what will the future bring for consumer reviews?And what role will technology play in improving how consumers give and companies receive feedback?

Based on the current technology and environment, here are five predictions of where consumer reviews could go to solve these pressing issues:

1. Point of Sale Surveys

“Yes,” you might be saying, “I already get this at the bottom of my receipt when I go to Burger King or Walmart.” No, what you actually get is an invite to navigate to a website or call a number and take five minutes of your day to take their survey, usually with the promise of a discount off your next purchase.

Or another current favorite is sending a periodic email to your customers with a big headline at the top: “How did we do?”

The problem with these approaches is that it takes a special kind of customer to go to all that trouble long after they’ve left your business. Those who do are hardly representative of your customers as a whole, in the same way news polls are always skewed because only people who enjoy phone surveys participate.

Perhaps even worse, by the time they actually take your survey, these customers are far-removed from their experience with you. The passage of time has made their responses unreliable.

In the coming years, expect that companies who care about reviews — and the accuracy of those reviews — to create ways to survey customers closer to the point of sale.

For instance, last year, Olive Garden outfitted all of their tables with Ziosk tablets, which allow customers to, among other things, leave feedback about their experience or like the restaurant chain on Facebook, right at their tables before they leave the restaurant.

Another possible application could be seen in smartphone notifications, where a retailer sends you a survey notification seconds after you return an item or swipe your card to make a purchase.

With this greater proximity to the actual experience, companies will be much more likely to capture accurate data on what they did well and how they can improve.

2. Emotion Recognition

What’s easier than getting customers to submit a review or fill out a survey? How about reading their minds by reading their facial expressions? What if you could recognize how your customers felt about their experience with you without even having to ask them?

You probably know that facial recognition software is already in use by governments and private companies to spot individuals in a crowd. As part of the burgeoning facial recognition industry, however, new apps are emerging that will allow you to read customers’ emotions based on the movement of points on their faces.

“Emotive analytics is an interesting blend of psychology and technology,” Bill Doerrfield, editor-in-chief at Nordic APIs, explains. “Though arguably reductive, many facial expression detection tools lump human emotion into 7 main categories: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, Surprise, Contempt, and Disgust.”

Using this technology in stores or while customers are shopping on company websites, companies would be able to identify and catalog good customer experiences and bad ones, on a massive scale. Doerrfield says:

“User response to video games, commercials, or products can all be tested at a larger scale, with large data accumulated automatically, and thus more efficiently.”

Obviously, in the near-future, this technology couldn’t assess why a customer was happy or sad with the product or service they received, only that the customer was happy, sad, disgusted, etc., with it. But coupled with the next prediction, this tool for instant feedback could be so powerful, it’s scary…

3. Language Analysis

In the present, consumers, in general, provide a wealth of data online about how they feel about the products and services they consume. They do this on forums, message boards, and social media. The problem is, extracting this data from everything else, scooping it all together, and making sense of it has been so difficult that companies have opted instead to just ask consumers to tell them directly.

The problem, in turn, with asking directly is that consumers’ responses take on subtle, but important, inaccuracies. Some consumers might be soften the blow and sugarcoat their answers. Others will seize the opportunity to punish companies they dislike by being overly harsh.

But what if you could gather consumer sentiments from across social media, forums, blogs, and other Internet venues to get a truly complete picture of what consumers are saying about your company, and gather it without asking them directly?

New companies are emerging that sweep the Internet for the language consumers use about companies and look for patterns in that language. Relative Insight, for example, can collect millions of words from parenting forums to find patterns in how they talk about parenting, but also about companies and how they compare to their rivals.

This technology is not yet what it would need to be to build what amounts to mass consumers surveys, but it is a start and it’s not the only game in town for language analysis.

“To detect emotion in the written word, sentiment analysis processing software can analyze text to conclude if a statement is generally positive or negative based on keywords and their valence index,” says Doerrfield. “Lastly, sonic algorithms have been produced that analyze recorded speech for both tone and word content.”

It’s easy to see how, in the near-future, companies will begin to combine language analysis, sentiment analysis, and sonic analysis to get very close to reading consumers’ minds on a mass scale without asking a single survey question.

Of course, this type of under-the-radar consumer data collection borders on a gross violation of privacy, but it would also miss a crucial component of reviews: the ability of other consumers to read existing reviews.

Will that stop data-hungry companies that want consumer data they can rely on? Probably not.

4. Customer Experience 3.0

Customer experience — or “CX,” to the cool kids — has become increasingly popular as of late as companies try to get their hands around how customers experience their products and services, no matter what venue that happens in. Right now, that focuses almost exclusively on gathering data about customer behavior during the buying cycle, from the time they first click on an ad to the time they make a purchase. They’ve gotten good enough to anticipate what a customer wants before they ask for it and how likely they are to buy or not.

But up until now it hasn’t been applied beyond the buying cycle — say, what happens after they purchase a product or service.

Most likely, as companies go deeper down the rabbit hole of CX, the more they will see the influence that post-purchase reactions have over future sales.

Expect to see the existing CX analytics and discipline applied to the post-sales funnel, where companies will use data to spot the cues that indicate how satisfied a customer is, what they might be dissatisfied with, how intense their dissatisfaction is, etc.

Again, this gets into some weird Minority Report territory, but such is the future of consumer data. You think it’s creepy that Google can guess what you’re going to search before you type it in? In the next 10 years, they might very well be able to guess what you want to say before you can even consciously think it.

5. Independent Review Governing Bodies

The U.S. Congress and the FTC are already wading waist-deep into the world of consumer reviews, hurling legislation and lawsuits left and right. Inasmuch as the government is never content to sit on the sidelines and let private industry have all the fun, we should be ready for the powers that be to intervene in bigger and bigger ways in the world of consumer reviews.

One possibility is the rise of one gigantic, government-run mega-review site. If the government determined that reviews on sites like Yelp, Angie’s List, or Amazon were just too unreliable, too hard for private companies to police, and too vulnerable to the profit-making desires of the companies that built them, they might take it upon themselves to create a mega-review site that collects and verifies reviews about every company imaginable.

Imagine the Better Business Bureau website on nuclear steroids, and you’re halfway there.

The Future is Not Ours to See

So what will the future of consumer reviews really look like? It’s impossible to say. What is possible to say, however, is, reviews and customer feedback will continue to play an important role in how people decide what to buy. Companies will continue to find better ways to get at data that will make them more competitive. Governments will stumble over themselves to bring order to the inherent chaos of it all. How that will all come together is a mystery.