Your job doesn’t stop at collecting data and generating consumer insights. If you can’t effectively communicate those insights to the right people, the whole process could go to waste.

However, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to consumer insights reporting. At times, you’ll need to generate reports to product and engineering teams to refocus development processes. Other times, you’ll need to give marketing the insights necessary to fine-tune messaging for the preferences of your target audience. And in many cases, you’ll need to generate consumer insights reports for executive management to communicate market trends or activity amongst competitors.

No matter which stakeholders you’re talking to, you need to make sure you’re providing the right reports to collaborate most effectively. If you can deliver the following 10 analytics reports quickly and accurately, you’ll be well set up to work with any stakeholder in your organization.

1. Volume of Product Reviews per Product Over Time

Consumer insights aren’t always about what people are saying. Often, it’s about where they’re saying it and how often.

When you look at product reviews, you can break down reporting by channel and time period (week, month, quarter, etc.). Breaking product review reports down by channel (Amazon, Walmart, Target, etc.) can give you insight into where your customers are most active, which could impact marketing messaging.

Filtering product review volumes by week, month, or quarter can then give you another layer of insight into how consumer sentiment is trending.

A report summarizing review volume and sentiment over time for coffee makers – drawn directly from the Revuze platform

2. Product Review Volume vs. Competitors

Product review volume can be an indicator to consumers that your product is worth looking at. Positive or negative, high volumes of reviews show a level of social proof that gets consumers to consider purchasing your product.

Understanding how your product review volume compares to the competition can give your product and marketing teams insight into where improvements can be made. Whether you need to improve customer engagement to increase reviews or make product changes to address problems, gaining competitive intelligence can help.

A breakdown of the volume and sentiment over time for various coffee maker brands – drawn directly from Revuze’s platform

3. Average Consumer Sentiment vs. Competition Over Time

Knowing how your customers feel about your products and your brand is always important. However, you can gain more actionable insights by reporting on how customer sentiment changes over time (weekly, monthly, etc.).

Take, for example, a new product launch in your organization. Being able to track consumer sentiment as it changes around the launch—especially compared to competitors—will let you know how to forecast revenue and create a strategy for ongoing product development. You could even track sentiment more granularity for insight into how specific marketing campaigns perform around a product.

Product reviews usually come to mind first when it comes to consumer sentiment. But you can also break down the report by other channels like call center transcripts, social media, and more.

Comparison of the average consumer sentiment over time of two competitors in the coffee maker market – drawn directly from the Revuze platform

4. Product Star Ratings Over Time

Overall star ratings can give you insight into how customers feel about your products. But the single, overall star rating isn’t all that matters to your business. Gaining consumer insights into how marketing campaigns, product launches, or service impacts those star ratings will help inform your next business decisions.

And it’s not just your internal activities that can impact star ratings. Analyzing competitive activity and correlating that data against your star rating will provide more actionable insight, especially for customer service and QA teams that need to understand changes in satisfaction.

5. Product Star Ratings vs. Industry and Competition

Star ratings are one of the most important contributing factors in purchase decisions. Knowing where you stand against your industry and specific competitors in a snapshot or overtime matters.

But scalability and sustainability aren’t just about star ratings—they’re about the “why” behind the ratings. What is it that makes your product stand out in the minds of customers? If you’re higher than the industry average, how can you maintain that position? And if you’re lower, how can you fix that in product development?

By continually running these reports, you can understand how your changes positively or negatively impact key metrics.

6. Key Aspects of Product by Volume and Sentiment

What aspects (or features) of your product do you want to understand more deeply? If you manufacture razors, you might want to understand skin sensitivity. For vacuum cleaners, maybe suction. Or for tissues, softness.

Whichever aspects of your product you want to track, it’s important to look closely at product reviews, call center transcripts, and other points of customer interaction to get the full picture.

The more aspects you can highlight with positive or negative sentiments, the more insightful your reports will be. But even if you’re only reporting on one characteristic, it’s important to gather as many data points as possible to get the best results.

A report featuring an extensive, granular list of attributes (for ex: cleanability, grinder, and brewing speed) used by consumers to compare coffee makers – drawn directly from the Revuze platform

7. Key Aspects of Competing Products by Volume and Sentiment

This is similar to the previous report but focused on your competitors instead of your own product reviews. It’s just as important to learn from others to improve your business. If they’re succeeding in one area that your product struggles, you can improve development, customer service, or marketing accordingly. Anything they’re doing poorly, you can capitalize on by leveraging marketing messages around those aspects of your own product.

8. One-Star to Three-Star Topics

Look at all of the one-star, two-star, and three-star reviews for your products. Analyzing the topics that customers consistently discuss can give you critical insight into where your products are falling short.

This isn’t just valuable for ongoing product development. Consider having your customer support team set up scripts for calls that come in regarding those topics. Streamlining those conversations will improve customer experience and reduce churn—even if the product received lower star ratings.

9. Four-Star to Five-Star Topics

Just as important as lower ratings, it’s important to know what’s working for customers and why.

If there are topics that come up consistently, your marketing team can tailor marketing messages according to the most popular features. By creating messaging that follows what you know customers already like, you’ll be able to attract consumers who are similar to existing customers.

10. Voice of Customer Reports for Key Topics

Depending on the questions you’re trying to answer, voice of customer reports can be pulled for specific aspects of your product and plotted against consumer sentiment.

Razor blades offer a good example. A common complaint for customers is that their razors aren’t sharp enough. If you can report on sharpness as a voice of customer concept over time, you can see if changes to your product have made a difference in the eyes of consumers.

Gaining Access to Key Consumer Insights Reports

Knowing that these reports are important is one thing—actually having the tools and data necessary to run them is another.

Traditional market research tools often don’t provide the level of self-service necessary to run all of these reports internally. You’d need survey tools, focus groups, and outside help to get the job done. Now, you can take advantage of advanced self-service tools to understand customer sentiment and automate consumer insights.

If you want to learn about how Revuze can help you run all the consumer insights reports you need, contact us today for a free demo.

Boaz Grinvald