Paul Kirwin, CEO of Channel Signal, discusses how current companies are measuring product review feedback.
1) They Don’t
Many companies don’t collect, measure or analyze their products reviews. These companies have no idea what the true voice of the customer is with regard to product performance. They don’t know why products are failing or why products are trending. Ultimately, these companies miss opportunities to fix problems or pull out the winning products to help grow the company.
2) One-Off Search & Excel Spread Sheet
Other companies build teams around reading product reviews. However, without the right tools employees are required to do one-off searches where the team has to go to each eCommerce partner and each product to manually aggregate the information. Human errors result in many problems especially when trending of data is critical to the success of the product. Additionally, it costs a lot of money to manage a team of individual analysts who review every single product for every single eCommerce partner.
3) Product Analytics Platform
Recognizing the need to understand the voice of the consumer, more and more companies are moving toward a product review analytics platform, like Channel Signal. Companies are finding the ability to pull from any website or eCommerce partner and aggregate all of the data into an easy to use platform useful in making decisions that directly affect the future of the company.
Not all platforms are created equal. As our clients are seeing, Channel Signal pulls from any eCommerce partner. This requires the need to normalize products under one product titles. Many vendors tend to list products under different names, which can make comparing trending information difficult. We go through and make sure all like products are normalized to one title prior to analysis.
Companies find the need to dive deeper into the voice of the consumer. Companies are using Channel Signal to pull out keywords like price, fit, or quality and comparing those review to sentiment, star rating. With an easy to use export system, clients are also able to take this information and integrate it into their current reporting systems. This is great for tying the voice of the consumer directly to manufacturing, sales, marketing or new product development.
With more than 90% of consumers using product reviews as part of their purchase decisions, companies need to be monitoring consumer reviews and one off solution are too costly. We highly recommend moving toward a platform base product review analytics platform.