Emily Louise Spencer is an in-house content writer at Revuze. She is a graduate of the University of York with a master's degree in Chemistry. A published scientific author, she now works as a content writer and copy editor.
Reviews are a useful source of information, but don’t be fooled into thinking that’s all they can do. When incorporated into your marketing, reviews can be powerful tools to sway consumers to your side.
Incorporating feedback and customer opinion into marketing is nothing new. Ever since the first markets and bazaars appeared and humankind began to operate under an economy, word of mouth has been used to spread awareness of quality and let others know that a business is reliable.
Hear ye, hear ye, and all that.
In the twenty-first century, things are a little more complex than simply shouting on street corners. It requires careful thought and careful implementation, especially in the realm of e-commerce.
Today, let’s look at five ways in which you can use reviews in your e-commerce marketing, and how you might go about implementing them.
Here we go.
1. Adding reviews that highlight product features into your promotions
When marketing a product one of the main aims is to let customers know of its capabilities. After all, many consumers can be swayed to one product or another by superior capability.
Why would anyone buy your 32GB phone, for instance, if your competitor offers an otherwise comparable 64GB phone for a similar price?
By adding reviews into your promotions not only can you highlight your product’s superior capabilities, but you’ll also be using the perspective of the customer who left that review to your advantage.
In this promotion from Lancome USA, images of their new product are placed next to real customer reviews that highlight product features.
From these short, simple reviews the reader is told:
The product has great coverage
It is lightweight
It has SPF Factor 25 coverage
It provides a natural finish
Product features can be perfect in theory, but by grounding your promotion in the real world with a real user consumers are far more likely to believe your promotion.
Statistics can be misleading, real feedback is far more reliable in the consumer’s eye.
2. Turning reviews into customer success stories
While a short, snappy review might be enough to draw a consumer’s interest, sometimes you need something more concrete and in-depth in order to keep it.
Customer success stories are, put simply, longer-form narratives that detail how a customer used your product to solve a problem.
Customer success stories are seen as more attractive than simple technical information, simply by having a name and a face attached. After all, it’s shared experiences that consumers relate to, not dry statistics.
Don’t be fooled by the term “longer-form”, we’re not talking about essays here. Customer success stories only need the following components:
The problem
How your product solved the problem
Testimony from your customer that adds a sense of validity
Unfortunately, customers don’t always lay these out exactly in their reviews. Because of this, you’ll have to fill in the blanks and craft the narrative yourself.
Scouring your reviews for an appropriate one can take time, but is greatly rewarding.
Got it? Good. Let’s take a look at a real example.
Not to blow our own trumpet, but Revuze’s customer success stories are a prime example of how to use feedback to your advantage. Today, we’re going to focus on this particular example from Char-Broil.
To begin, we used a simple headline that gives a simple piece of information – Char-Broil using Revuze’s platform to transform itself into a data-driven company
In this title, we’ve named the problem, the product used to solve it, and the organization that used their product to do so.
Simple, effective, and informative.
Further down, more information on the defined problem is provided alongside more detailed information on the situation for a more in-depth look.
Next, detailed information on how our Explorer platform was useful to Char-Broil is given.
Sprinkled throughout the page for emphasis, we have official quotes from reviews that shed further light on the situation.
With names and faces attached, these testimonies become that much more real and believable to the reader. It’s one thing to be given information by Revuze, it’s another to hear it from the mouths of our customers.
In addition, there are several short testimonies from our own team that really drive the point home.
To recap, Char-Broil’s customer success story included the three simple elements we discussed before: the challenge, solution, and real customer quotes. While the long case study might seem intimidating, it’s no different from any other customer success story.
3. Updating your website content to align with customer expectations
It’s no secret that consumers are fickle creatures. You need to constantly be updating your content in order to align with consumer expectations.
It’s estimated that nearly 20% of consumers have an attention span of perhaps four seconds when interacting with new content.
Four seconds!
Not even enough time to boil a kettle.
It’s largely attributed to so-called “information overload”, where readers are confronted with more new information than they can handle.
So, what do you do about it? Well, you use familiar language of course.
You’ve probably come across this yourself when you re-read something that you’ve read before. It’s easier the second time, right?
You can look at words and phrases in the same way. The language your customers use when talking about your brand will reveal what type of language they associate with you, and what type of language they’re used to using when discussing you.
There’s a reason reading legal documents is left to the lawyers.
So, what do you do? Well, you compare your content and the language used within to the discussion you see around you, your content, and your products and make adjustments accordingly.
By matching your language to that which your customers use you will hold their attention for longer, be easier to digest, and overall come across as more relatable and more in-tune with their desires.
Remember though, this is an evolving process. Your customer base might shift over time and as such your content will need to shift also.
4. Using SEO to improve your search engine standings
This one delves into the more technical side of marketing, so bear with us.
When you want to rank highly in search engine results, it’s not just about what the consumer types in. You see, search engine algorithms have their own criteria for how relevant a site or brand is which affects how high you rank.
Paid ads aside, the first link that pops up when you search for “Amazon” is always Amazon itself. That’s the kind of standing you should strive for with your brand.
Unfortunately, when your customers aren’t searching for you directly it’s a bit harder to rate highly on the rankings. It’s even trickier when you realize that the inner workings of search engines aren’t exactly public knowledge.
Google might tell us when they change the algorithms, but they don’t give out all the details.
So does this mean you’re stabbing in the dark? Well not exactly.
While we don’t know the exact ways in which search engines work, we know enough. We also know that when consumers search for certain products, they’ll use certain terminology and phrasing.
Think about the last time you googled something specific. Did you just type in broad terms that vaguely defined what you were looking for, or did you try to be precise?
The trick is knowing what your potential customer base will be searching for, and adding those specific keywords into your content in order to make the search engine flag it as more relevant.
So, the main question of the hour is, how do you know what keywords to use?
Simple.
Reviews.
The language that is used in reviews will indicate what phrases, wordings, etc. they would use when searching for a product in a search engine.
These can boil down to word choices too, with some words having identical meanings but very different results when entered into a search engine.
Gigabyte or GB?
Pure cotton or 100% cotton?
Coverage or cover?
It’s never quite that straightforward to know how your customers will talk about you, you have to look for it. Fortunately, Revuze can help.
Revuze’s Explorer platform allows you to delve into the keywords surrounding your brand, product categories, and even individual products. It’s a simple, easy-to-use system, with the size of the respective word representing how much it’s used within your consumer reviews.
Are all of the words on the word cloud going to be directly relevant to SEO?
Well, no. Some of them are a bit too vague or commonplace to try and rank for directly in searches. What you need to do is look into which keywords are specific to your industry, and try to rank for those.
Let’s imagine for a second that you’re an e-commerce store dealing (at least partially) in headphones. The above word cloud is a great example of what chatter you might see around these within reviews.
As you can see, “sound” is the most highly ranked word, but it isn’t too relevant by itself. The word sound is rarely going to be searched for by itself in this context.
Ranking lower is “sound quality”. This makes sense, as the specific phrase is naturally going to be used less than a word within it.
However, this one is the golden goose.
“Sound quality” is a key phrase that links specifically to headphones as a product. Rank highly for this, and you’ll be on your way to ranking highly on search engine results pages.
And … repeat.
One keyword isn’t enough. There are plenty in the word cloud that you can aim for, notably “battery life” and “charge” being almost as present in review text as sound quality.
You’ve got to hit all the right notes you see, or your tune isn’t going to resonate with consumer searches.
In addition, SEO is an evolving discipline that isn’t ever done. Times change, consumers change, and the terms they use to search change too. You must monitor your SEO to keep up or be left in the dust.
5. Incorporating reviews into your content
Incorporating reviews themselves is a great way to hit SEO keywords. After all, what’s a better way to make sure your content uses the same keywords as reviews than simply adding reviews directly into it?
Well, there’s a catch. As we discussed before, SEO looks for out-of-place text that doesn’t flow well. Simply sticking reviews randomly won’t work, you need to use them to highlight your content.
What exactly your content is doesn’t matter in this case. What does matter is how you incorporate reviews into it.
Let’s look at some real examples of actual reviews this time, and see how other e-commerce brands have used them to highlight their content.
Crate & Barrel’s home page sneaks in a review for its spotlight collection down in the bottom left corner. It’s non-intrusive and doesn’t take your ability to view the page away, but it definitely sticks out enough to influence the reader’s perception.
The example follows the SEO rules that were laid out earlier. They blend in well with the content, don’t seem to come out of nowhere, and are small and non-intrusive enough not to be a turn-off to readers.
Wrapping up
Hopefully, you’ve learned something new about how to use reviews in your marketing from us today. If these weren’t quite what you were looking for, don’t fret! More articles are planned around using reviews for:
Sales
Product development
Data science
We’re Revuze, and reviews are our game after all.
See what we did there? Eh?
In the meantime, why not check out our guide to review analysis that will help you get that little bit more information out of what customers leave behind?
While ecommerce is online-based, some brick-and-mortar principles must be taken into consideration. One of the most common ones is the make-or-buy decision, providing food for thought for businesses in the past decades. Learn what it means, and how to decide if you should make or buy.
It’s an old-time dilemma in manufacturing & traditional industries.
When you need a part, do you make it or buy it?
This question pops up in situations where you need a part and have two options for how to obtain it:
To create, manufacture or otherwise make a needed part yourself.
To purchase the needed part from another party.
Now you might be thinking, this doesn’t seem relevant to the world of ecommerce. What’s going on here? ????
Let’s start with this pressing question, then.
How are make-or-buy decisions relevant to ecommerce?
This decision-making process can be applied in places other than manufacturing.
Make-or-buy decisions can potentially affect all purchases of a business, whether they know it or not.
If you’ve purchased antivirus software for your computers, you’ve made a decision to buy it.
If you’re printing your shipping labels in-house, you’ve decided to make them.
While these are easy picks to make, sometimes you run into situations where the choice isn’t so easy to make. Here’s a quick look at some of them.
What are some situations in ecommerce that might force a make-or-buy decision?
It’s all well and good to talk hypotheticals, but we need real examples to set the ball rolling here.
Using an ecommerce platform
When you’re starting out on your ecommerce journey, one of the first things you ask yourself might be “Where am I going to host my store?”
There are plenty of pre-existing platforms out there. Amazon, eBay, and Etsy, to name but a few. You could quite easily set up shop there, pay them hosting fees, and conform to their guidelines.
Or.
You could create your own custom website, tailored to your specific idea of how you want your shop to look, and run it yourself.
Both options have their pros and cons. Creating your own website will come with higher degrees of flexibility, zero hosting fees, and no restrictions on what you can and cannot do.
On the other hand, you’d need to create your website from scratch, maintain it, and host its servers yourself.
It’s a tough decision to make and largely depends on your resources, size, and technical know-how. For newcomers, it might be best to test the waters with the big players out there, giving you a feel of the process. Later on, once you need the flexibility and feel like you’re up to the task, you can spread your wings and create your own store.
Website creation
To carry on from the example above, it’s worth mentioning the decision that you make when you’re creating a website. Let’s say you made the choice to go with your own website, and now you’re looking for how to make one.
There are a couple of options:
Have your team create one themselves.
Hire an outside professional to create it for you.
Use a website template as a middle ground.
Your choice will naturally be influenced by your available on-staff expertise and your team’s workload. On top of that, you’ll need to consider where and how to use your limited human resources.
Of course, there’s also the factor of cost.
Hiring a professional might get you there faster and easier, but it can prove more expensive compared to an in-house job.
Make or buy it, then? Yeah, the answer isn’t so simple.
Make-or-rent decisions
One important factor to note about ecommerce is that due to the nature of going digital, some costs will be recurring, rather than flat. Think subscriptions, monthly fees, etc.
It might be appropriate to rename the dilemma to make-or-rent, but that doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, now does it?
The ultimate point is that you shouldn’t be put off by the high initial costs of making if you’re getting a forever asset out of it, compared to an initially low-cost buying (or renting/subscribing) decision that will only get more expensive as time goes on.
On the flip side, some assets need constant updating and as such might be cheap to make, but wouldn’t be nearly as cheap to maintain as if you had simply bought from a professional.
One thing to keep in mind is that these decisions aren’t final. Ecommerce has flexibility that regular commerce doesn’t, with assets being able to be moved in mere seconds rather than months.
How do you decide whether to make-or-buy?
One mistake that a lot of people make is assuming that make-or-buy decisions are solely influenced by cost.
While it’s true that the cost of acquiring an asset is definitely a big factor, there are also other factors. Nominally, how well the asset will fit into your operations.
You might think that if you’re buying something it would be a perfect fit. That’s a nice thought, but more than often this thought doesn’t translate into reality.
This is especially the case in the world of ecommerce, where software and other pre-existing assets are often only affordable in pre-existing packets. Custom software is very expensive, with small businesses especially only having the budget for premade variants.
With that in mind, let’s go through the four steps for making a make-or-buy decision.
#1 Lay out the pros/cons of making
The advantages of making usually include:
Lower overall cost.
Higher ability to tailor the asset to your needs.
Better customization options.
The ability to alter the asset in the future.
Easier integration into your workflow.
Meanwhile, the cons can be along the lines of:
Limited support.
A longer time frame for obtaining the asset.
Requiring employees with this expertise.
Non-standard code (if software-based).
These might not be strictly true in all cases, however they generally hold true.
Now, you might have a question about the last con we mentioned, that of non-standard code. Let’s break down why that might be a problem.
While companies that create software might enforce standards, a freeform in-house creation will do anything that it needs to in order to get the job done.
This might sound like a good thing, but it may make the code highly difficult to interpret by anyone else. This means if the particular employee or group of employees that wrote the code is unavailable, it will be more difficult for anyone else to work with it.
#2 Lay out the pros/cons of buying
Buying an asset generally comes with:
A more standard code base (if software-based).
Greater support.
Speedier acquisition.
A more professional look.
A guarantee or warranty.
The ability to use assets outside of your area of expertise.
On the other hand, you have:
Higher costs.
Fewer customization options (unless you’re willing to pay more).
Inability to change the asset without going back to the manufacturer.
Possible difficulties integrating with other areas of your business.
Potentially having to purchase other assets to keep this one running.
As mentioned before these aren’t always the case, but as a general rule of thumb, they’re something to look out for.
#3 Decide which factors are your priority
As mentioned earlier, it’s not all about cost. Sometimes you want to have a better asset, even when you have to pay more money for it. So, what is the right way to choose? Well, it’s all about priorities.
Whenever you purchase an asset, you do it for a reason. That reason should form the basis of your decision.
Say you were looking for software to track your sales and log the information. The purpose behind that would be to make your admin easier.
There’s always a core reason. Otherwise, there’d be no motive to obtain the asset in the first place.
#4 Make a choice based on the available information
Once you’ve got your priorities in your mind, and the pros/cons listed, it’s time to compare them.
Ultimately, cost can be a limiting factor only in these decisions. It’s not just about what’s the best option, but what’s the best option that you can afford. At this point, you should strike off any options you can’t find the budget for.
Once you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains is what you can realistically use. From there, you should apply your priorities to decide which of the remaining options best fits your needs, and select that one.
Simple, straightforward, easy.
Wrapping up
Hopefully, you’ve learned something about make-or-buy decisions today, and have come away feeling more confident in your ability to make them.
While you’re here, why not check out our guide to ecommerce personalization, and use the principles you’ve learned here to decide if it’s right for you.
Time to market (TTM) is a key metric for increasing a new product’s chances of success. Learn about the importance of TTM and discover strategies your business can use to accelerate product development cycles.
Today’s business landscape moves fast.
Your company’s ability to bring a product to market quickly can be the thing that makes or breaks your product’s launch.
This is why it’s become common practice for businesses to focus on time to market, a metric that measures how long it takes for a company to release a product.
A faster time to market can lead to competitive advantage, brand recognition, and higher revenue – all highly desirable outcomes.
In this article, we’ll cover this critical metric, discussing what it is, how to measure it, and some key techniques for accelerating it.
What is time to market?
Time to market (TTM) is a metric that measures how long it takes for a company to bring a product through the entire launch cycle from initial ideation to market release.
For example, if you come up with the idea for a new product on January 1st and launch it on July 1st, your TTM will be six months, or two quarters.
Time to market is an important measure in fast-moving, agile industries.
Bringing a product to the market first can offer a significant competitive advantage (often called first mover advantage), giving you enough time to win brand loyalty and recognition before your competitors release a competing product.
On the other hand, a slow TTM might mean that your product will be lost in the fray by the time it’s released, leaving your company in the weak position of playing catch-up.
This is why many businesses prioritize time to market as an important KPI.
While it’s important not to sacrifice quality for the sake of accelerating TTM, doing so the right way can have a number of benefits including:
Higher revenue – The sooner you can bring your product to market, the sooner you will be able to earn revenue from it, especially if there is minimal competition within the market
Lower costs – The less time your product spends in the costly development stage, the lower your total cost will be of producing it, making the product more profitable
Higher market share – With less competition, your product is certain to capture a higher share of the market
Brand reputation – Instagram Reels may be a successful imitator of TikTok, but audiences continue to associate the short-form vertical video format with the company that first made it popular. This demonstrates how much first-mover advantage can impact your brand’s recognition and reputation.
This graph from RubyGarage demonstrates how TTM can impact sales
What is TTM vs. GTM?
Another term related to time to market is go-to-market or GTM. While time to market is a metric measured by an amount of time, GTM refers to a strategy.
Specifically, a company’s go-to-market strategy is the methodology they apply to introducing and marketing a product to potential customers.
GTM includes everything from marketing and advertising to sales and distribution. A strong GTM strategy is an essential part of a product’s success, helping a business drive sales by better reaching its target market and generating demand for a product.
TTM and GTM can have a significant impact on one another. A well-planned GTM strategy has the ability to shorten TTM by creating early demand for a product, enabling companies to execute helpful market research, gather customer feedback, and even pre-sell products.
Conversely, a shorter TTM can enable sales by ensuring that a product enters a less competitive market, making GTM easier. For success with a new product, TTM and GTM are both important factors to consider, both helping the launch process go smoothly.
How to measure TTM
The good news is that measuring TTM is quite straightforward as long as you keep accurate records about your product development process. Your TTM will be measured in time, whether that is days or weeks (less likely) or months or years (more likely).
There are several options for exactly how to measure the TTM period. Potential starting points for measuring TTM include:
When an idea is first mentioned.
When your business decides to move forward with an idea.
When an idea is approved.
When the project is first assigned resources, including personnel and budget.
Potential endpoints for measuring TTM include:
When the product goes into manufacturing.
When the product first hits the market.
When the first sale is made.
It’s ultimately up to your company how you want to define TTM for your own internal purposes, but it’s a good idea to stay consistent from product to product. This will help with your internal benchmarking, allowing you to more accurately compare the TTMs of different products.
How to accelerate TTM
With how much of an impact TTM can have on your product’s success, it’s standard for companies to aim to create processes and initiatives that help reduce, or accelerate, TTM. There are many different strategies and approaches that a business can take in order to become faster and more efficient in the product development process. We explore some of the most relevant and popular techniques below.
1. Assigning more resources to the product
The more resources you can dedicate to a project, the faster it’s likely that the development cycle will take.
More budget and more people allow you to increase work capacity, enable multiple teams to work on different parts of the project in parallel, and help employees focus better to produce better quality work.
However, it’s important to ensure these resources are used effectively and efficiently, as more people also require more coordination and improved communication.
2. Release an MVP
Source: This infographic from Inflectiv illustrates how to build an MVP
While it can be tempting to wait until a product is absolutely perfect before release, this can significantly slow down TTM. Enter the concept of MVP: a minimum viable product.
This strategy involves releasing a product with the minimum features needed to satisfy early customers and gathering feedback for further improvements. It can help companies test the viability of a product while reducing TTM.
3. Streamline workflows
One of the most important things you can do to accelerate TTM is to optimize and streamline your workflows.
The more steps and blockers employees face in their jobs, the slower the development process will be.
Similarly, do what you can to minimize the number of approvals required to begin working on something. Multiple approvals from many different stakeholders are often redundant and lead to unnecessary wasted time.
4. Use automation
One thing that can make your workflows much faster and more efficient is automation. Modern technology can automate many different repetitive tasks, freeing employees up to work faster and focusing on more strategic, needle-moving tasks.
That’s not to mention the fact that delegating more tasks to computers and AI helps reduce human error, further contributing to increased efficiency.
5. Do your research
The more market research you can do upfront, the better understanding you can develop of the marketplace you’ll be launching your product into. This can help you get things right the first time and avoid mistakes that will cost your team a lot of time (not to mention money).
AI-powered market research platforms like Revuze can deliver insights in just hours, helping you design a GTM strategy that will enable as fast a TTM as is reasonable.
This success story from leading grill-maker Char-Broil goes into detail, explaining how automating market research boosted revenue and accelerated TTM.
6. Take an agile approach
Agile is a product development methodology originating in the high-tech world that focuses on enabling teams to work more efficiently and respond to change with flexibility.
The principles of agile, including breaking down projects into small manageable tasks, receiving continuous feedback, ongoing testing and Q&A, adaptability, and empowering team members, can all help contribute to a faster TTM.
This graphic from Replicon illustrated how the agile methodology works
7. Consider outsourcing
Another strategy that can help speed up your development process is outsourcing to external partners.
When doing so, you gain access to people with specialized expertise. Further, outsourcing allows you to quickly scale your team up or down in accordance with your needs without having to spend the time and money required to hire and train new employees.
In general, external partners are often able to provide services at a lower cost than hiring a full-time employee would incur, meaning you can spend resources more efficiently and receive more bang for your buck.
8. Prioritize communication
Product development requires many different employees and teams to collaborate efficiently and effectively toward the same goal. Strong communication is absolutely essential to achieving successful collaboration.
Stakeholders effectively communicating the requirements for a product helps reduce misunderstandings, revisions, and delays. Effective communication can also help improve risk management and ensure that feedback is received and acted upon quickly to improve the quality of the product.
9. Reduce silos and bottlenecks
One major obstacle to fast TTM is the bottlenecks and silos that can exist in large organizations. In order to work together effectively, every team member and individual working on the development of your product should have open lines of communication and clear guidelines for how to cooperate and collaborate effectively.
Transparency and free-flowing information are key to making sure that workflows flow freely and blockers don’t hold up a project and cause unnecessary delays.
Conclusion
Time to market is a critical metric that can have a significant impact on the success or failure of a product release.
By prioritizing and striving to accelerate your TTM, you can improve your market share and enjoy a more profitable product.
The right partners, technology, and strategies for improving communication, agility, and workflow can all contribute to a much faster TTM and, in turn, a more successful product launch. And you know what else can help you create products that perfectly fit your user base? Collecting customer intelligence to understand your customers’ wants and needs. Read more about it in this article.
Online reviews are a gold mine of valuable data about customers’ opinions on your brand, products, or services. Review analysis allows you to strategically collect and interpret it to gain actionable insights that can improve your business’s decision-making. This article explains how review analysis works, why it’s essential, and how you can get started with it.
For businesses seeking to improve products, optimize the customer experience, develop a positive brand reputation, and boost revenue, there is nothing as valuable as customers’ opinions.
Truly understanding your customers’ needs and desires is essential to giving you a much-needed guiding light to inform your decision-making.
There are many different ways to try to solicit customer feedback, but chances are high that you already have a treasure trove of valuable data available to you: customer reviews. They’re honest, they’re informative, and they’re plentiful.
By structuring and interpreting this data – a process called review analysis – your organization can receive invaluable insights that have the potential to transform your business.
Below, we’ll go over everything you need to know about review analysis, from what it is to why it matters, to the tools and practices that will help you implement it.
Let’s dive in.
What is review analysis?
Review analysis is a business intelligence practice that involves gathering, structuring, and analyzing customer feedback in order to discover insights about a brand’s product, services, and/or reputation that can be used to inform decision-making.
Review analysis involves three steps: gathering reviews, structuring data, and analyzing it.
Gathering review data
First, you must collect reviews about your business’s products or services.
Reviews can be scattered all over the internet in places such as Google, Yelp, Facebook, industry-specific review sites, the app store, and your own website, to name a few. In order to be able to analyze them, you must first extract and gather reviews into a single place.
Structuring review data
Next, you have to structure the data.
Raw reviews are considered to be a type of unstructured data, or data that has not been organized or formatted in any way.
Unstructured data is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to analyze systematically. This means that structuring data, typically with the help of AI-powered natural language processing tools, is necessary.
Analyzing review data
The final step of review analysis is the actual analysis.
This involves extracting topics, discovering consumer sentiment, and identifying trends. The end product of this step is a better understanding of your customers’ opinions: whether they like or dislike a product, whether they’re requesting a new color or feature, etc.
A word cloud created from customer review data helps visualize common topics mentioned
What’s next?
Of course, review analysis is not the end of the road. It’s a process that can give you the information you need to make more strategic, informed decisions to help you meet your business’s goals.
The most important part of review analysis, then, is how you apply the insights you learn. There are many possible applications for review analysis including:
Product development
Improving existing products
Identifying problems such as bugs
Learning what to prioritize in your product roadmap
Why is review analysis important?
Review analysis is an essential practice for any organization that cares about its customers’ opinions.
This is an absolute must if you want to earn a reputation as a customer-centric company.
But even if your approach is simpler and more old-school, focused on making sales and generating more revenue, review analysis is no less important.
Some of the benefits of review analysis include:
Improving customer experience and offering superior customer service – According to a 2022 Emplifi report,61% of consumers will pay at least 5% more if they know they’ll get a good customer experience. Review analysis is one way to reap the benefits of improved CX.
Identify problems – If your product isn’t meeting customer expectations or your website is bugging on users, you need to know. Review analysis is a helpful tool for identifying friction points, gaps, and other issues.
Increase sales – Among other things, customer reviews contain information about what your business can do in order to make your customers buy more. Customers mention new colors they want, ideas for new products, and changes you can make that would convert them into repeating customers – all important paths toward increasing conversions and sales.
Improve brand loyalty and customer retention – By listening to what customers want and what would make them happy, you can boost brand loyalty and reduce churn. Remember, it’s more expensive to get a new customer as opposed to retaining one, so retention is always a key focus.
Better decision-making – Businesses regularly have to decide which products to improve, create, and prioritize – and these decisions have major consequences. Review analysis helps you make them strategically and wisely.
Manage reputation – A small mistake can have huge repercussions if it isn’t addressed quickly enough. Review analysis helps you identify spikes in negative comments or low ratings so you’re aware of changes in your brand reputation and can take immediate action.
How do you analyze customer reviews?
There are two options for ways to conduct customer and product review analysis: manually or automatically. Manual review analysis is unrealistic for most companies. It requires you to:
Mine the internet for reviews about your company and products/services from a number of different sources and consolidate the data into one place
Structure the language data by cleaning and preparing it for text analysis. This requires tasks such as tokenization, stemming, and parsing, among others.
Analyze reviews with processes such as keyword extraction, text summarization, and sentiment analysis
Extract insights and present them in a way that is easy to understand, often through visual representations such as charts and graphs
As you can imagine, this process can be incredibly laborious and time-intensive. Unless you have a very small number of reviews to analyze – or a massive workforce of people available to put hours toward the task – you’ll need some technological help with the process of gathering, structuring, and analyzing review data on your own.
Thankfully, there are numerous tools and solutions available to help you conduct review analysis with the help of advanced technology like AI and machine learning. This helps you do it more efficiently and without the pitfall of human mistakes.
With the help of smart review analysis tools, the process of review analysis shifts to look more like this:
Find and choose the right review analysis tools.
Use the tool.
Explore the results.
As you can see, the most important part of this process is finding the right solutions for your review analysis needs.
Review analysis tools
The solutions you implement for review analysis can vary depending on your needs.
You may stick with a singular-focus solution, like a dashboarding tool to help you visualize analysis results, or choose an all-in-one review analysis platform that will do every step of the process for you.
Below, we gather some excellent tools to know about.
Revuze
Revuze is a cloud-based review analysis platform that uses artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing (NLP) to analyze and understand customer feedback from sources such as online reviews, social media, and surveys.
Revuze’s AI can automatically collect data from online reviews, classify, clean, and organize it, extracting relevant topics and detecting customer sentiment. This automatic process reduces what could be a months-long research to mere hours, delivering easy-to-understand, actionable insights quickly.
Revuze’s dashboard gives an overview of the most discussed topics, trending topics, average ratings, and more.
Trustpilot
Trustpilot is an online review platform. In addition to serving as a place for customers to leave feedback and ratings, Trustpilot also allows businesses to look at their own customer reviews and visualize trends.
While it can’t give you much detail or control, Trustpilot is a helpful, free tool for a quick overview of customer reviews from a specific source.
An example of a dashboard available on Trustpilot visualizing the distribution of new star ratings over the past 12 months
Hootsuite Insights
If you want to look at what customers are saying about you on social media, as well, Hootsuite Insights may be a tool worth looking into.
It’s a free social media listening tool that allows businesses to track and analyze customer sentiment and feedback on social media platforms. It may be useful if your audience is more likely to tweet their review than post it through an official channel.
An example of a Hootsuite Insights dashboard visualizing sentiment volume over time
Conclusion
Every stakeholder, project manager, and decision-maker at your company has probably experienced a moment of indecision, wishing they could simply read your customers’ minds to know how to proceed. Review analysis is a tool that enables this much sought-after mind reading.
The data is out there; it’s just a matter of finding the right solutions to help you make sense of it. With the power of AI and NLP, you can take a jumble of overwhelming data and turn it into clear, visualized insights – essentially a roadmap to what your company can do to optimize customer experience, improve retention, and boost revenue.
If you’re looking for other ways to analyze readily-available data, consider conducting focus groups, feeding the data into an AI-powered analysis tool. Before you start, be sure you’re asking the right questions with your next focus group.
When creating a product, you can’t just spitball it. You need to take the time to create something that customers will actually want, and that is a better option than what they currently purchase. A product development strategy will assist you in finding your ideal product-market fit, and winning over customers from competing brands by providing a superior option.
What is a product development strategy?
You might have heard of the terms “new product development” or “new product development process” – while these are definitely important when creating a new product, they aren’t precisely what we’re talking about today.
A product development strategy is the direction that a new product release takes, from its market position to its overall demographic targeting process.
It’s a catch-all term that includes everything that takes place between having an idea for a product and actually putting it on the market.
The key takeaway here is that while new product development has to do with the actual act of creating a product, the product development strategy covers this and the steps needed to turn it into a viable, marketable product.
TCGen, which specializes in product development, has created a brilliant checklist that summarizes what a product development strategy is useful for, so take a look below.
So you might be thinking, if I’ve already implemented the new product development process, why do I need a product development strategy? After all, couldn’t I just take the end result and apply the same principles?
Well, you could. However, no business exists in a vacuum.
The fact of the matter is that some products aren’t just made for the sake of making good products that make money. They have another purpose. To gain a competitive advantage within the market, keep the company relevant, and claim a foothold that wouldn’t be available later.
It’s no coincidence that a new Xbox launches around the same time a new PlayStation does. Both companies can’t afford to concede market share to each other (Unless you’re Nintendo, and then you can do whatever you want).
Alternatively, businesses can patent & sell products simply so the competition can’t. Both Xbox and PlayStation have a long history of exclusive games, many of which were made by 3rd party companies.
The lesson here?
In the world of business, it isn’t enough to have a good product. You can still be undercut, out-advertised, and out-sold by another product if you don’t play it right.
That is to say, if you don’t have a good product development strategy.
What benefits can a product development strategy bring?
Okay, this sounds great in theory, but how do I apply it to my products? Fair question.
We touched briefly on why a product development strategy is important in the last section, but now it’s time to talk about tangible benefits.
So, what are some benefits of having a product development strategy?
Keeping an eye on the big picture from the start
When you have a product development strategy, you know exactly what it is you’re trying to achieve.
That might sound like common sense but bear with me here.
Let’s say you’re making a line of clothing, and your big-picture aim is to introduce hypo-allergenic fabrics that you can market to customers with sensitive skin.
Now, if you simply tell your design team that you want a certain set of clothing, e.g., pants, shirts, etc., from pure cotton, all they know is the letter of the instructions, not the spirit.
Nevertheless, they get on with it and have a working set of prototypes produced.
So the day comes for them to produce their designs, and lo-and-behold, they’ve used a dye that renders the line completely unusable by people with sensitive skin.
So what now? Well, they’ve got to go back to the drawing board with more precise instructions.
When you have an overarching aim, you need to keep all of your teams informed so they can create products that fit the spirit of your aims, not just the letter.
A product development strategy does exactly this, aiming to focus on the product’s placement and market position every step of the way.
Aligning cross-functional teams
When you run a business that creates products, it’s expected that you’ll have more than one team working on different steps of the process.
Those involved in product creation aren’t necessarily the ones who will be manufacturing it, and vice-versa. Thus, when creating a new product with a specific aim, you need to be keeping everyone on the same page if you want things to run smoothly.
Easier said than done.
Sometimes there are factors that one team is aware of, but the other is not, making the entire process grind to a halt when a plan is produced that simply doesn’t work under current limitations.
For simplicity’s sake, let’s take the example of the clothing manufacturer above again.
Your design team has managed to avoid the issue with dyes and has created a sensible prototype. And so, they decide to pass it on to the manufacturing team to produce.
However, you run into yet another roadblock.
You see, the supplier of the dye that you’ve selected has had some bad press, and the dye itself isn’t considered that reliable by those who find hypoallergenic clothes a necessity.
Now, anyone on the marketing team could have told you this. It’s their job to know the ins and outs of the current market, and they could have saved you from having to loop back again if only you’d communicated.
Product development strategies include communication aspects like these, using the big-picture focus to bring in new information when it’s needed.
Kellogg’s championed their traditional cereals such as Cornflakes, Froot Loops, and Frosties for decades, but with times changing and consumer preferences shifting, they’ve widened their reach by acquiring more diverse options to keep their customers happy.
Feedback & guidance loops
Both of the above are examples of a business that’s missing feedback & guidance loops.
Feedback & guidance loops are lines of communication in which advice is passed on from further down the chain back to the product design team. By keeping themselves in the loop, delays and design errors can be avoided, and the process runs more smoothly overall.
Of course, these loops aren’t limited to being relevant to the design team.
All teams involved can benefit from them to some extent, even if the most obvious examples involve product design.
The big-picture approach requires, well, keeping the big picture in mind at all times.
And if factors change in one area, it’s going to have a knock-on effect that might alter your overall approach.
Efficiency
Lastly, let’s talk about efficiency.
The ultimate goal of business is to bring in revenue & make profits.
Now, this obviously means that you need a decent amount of sales, but there’s another side to it too. Costs.
You can have the most incredible products ever created, but if the costs of design are too high, then you’ll spend years in the red before ever being profitable.
That’s not to say that you can’t plan to be in the red, but it needs to be done carefully. Plenty of businesses thought that they were in the clear, only to be blindsided by the COVID-19 crisis in 2020.
What I’m trying to say is that the future is uncertain, and you need to be able to bounce back. Sinking into the red with a lengthy, inefficient product development process is precisely the opposite of that.
See, a lot of the time, your manufacturing costs can’t really be altered without affecting the quality of your products.
Your costs of sale, packaging, delivery, advertisement, and the like are often relatively static, especially if you use a third-party platform like Amazon or Etsy to sell.
So, when those two types of cost are static, and you need to lower your numbers, what do you do?
You improve your product development strategy, improve your efficiency, and decrease the amount of time & money it takes to develop a new product.
Every factor we’ve talked about thus far has been leading up to the ultimate goal of product development strategies; to make the process smoother and less costly to go through.
The 3 types of product development strategy
Rewinding back, let’s look at what a product development strategy is again before jumping right into the types you can have.
Product development strategies are all about aiming for sales. They’re all about trying to create & develop your new products in such a way that they’ll not only be great, but marketable.
You can have the greatest volcano-proof diving suit ever made, for example, but if no one will buy it, then from a business perspective, it’s a dud.
With that in mind, the types of product development strategies you can have are largely dependent on your marketing tactics.
Let’s take a look at the three most common types.
PDS type 1: Premium
When I think of premium, my mind jumps to brands like Louis Vuitton and Porsche.
What do these brands all have in common? Well, they’re high-end brands that market their products as luxuries, as things to aim to achieve.
They’re brands that enjoy high brand equity, with their products making people go “wow.”
These brands aim to be right at the top of the market, selling small numbers of products but at high prices. That way, they make a lot of profit per unit and increase their revenue overall.
There are downsides, though.
For one, costs are higher than average. This is expected, as you use “limited-edition” or “high-quality” materials in your products to make them more desirable.
Often, these materials are entirely superfluous to the nominal function of the product, such as diamond-encrusted handbags, but you could say that their purpose is to show off.
Remember, these are luxury products. Most drivers wouldn’t need a car that goes 250 mph and wouldn’t think about it when deciding to buy one. They’d just think about what can get them from A to B.
Someone looking for a luxury car, on the other hand, probably has the time and money spare to take it to a race track or onto a highway where such speeds are allowed, thus making such a feature relevant.
Further, luxury brands are very difficult to establish.
Unless you’re entering an entirely new market where almost all products were created recently, akin to Apple when establishing themselves in the PC industry, there are probably going to be big-name brands there already that won’t like you muscling in on their territory.
Keep in mind that often these brands have a long and proud history.
Many European and Asian brands date back centuries and take their longevity as a badge of honor. It’s taken as a standard of quality that they’ve been able to operate for so long and still stay in business.
The Genda Shigyō company that provides traditional Japanese gift wrapping has been running since 771! Just imagine trying to go up against that kind of established name!
There’s also the factor of a diminished customer base. It’s a fact that most Americans can’t afford luxury goods.
Fewer potential customers mean that every sale matters. Every sale lost matters even more. It’s vital to keep your quality high and your customers satisfied if you want to keep operating with this type of strategy.
PDS type 2: Budget
Entirely on the other end of the scale, we have the budget strategies.
These types of strategies follow the idiom “quantity over quality” to the extreme. In essence, by making very small amounts of profit on each sale but making lots of sales, you increase your profits.
And a low-cost product is far more likely to be bought by those who make choices on the basis of price alone, meaning a bigger reach for it.
Budget products are often thought of as low-quality, but this isn’t always the case. In this type of product development strategy especially, you keep your profit margins low to keep prices down rather than using cheap materials.
Remember, being a budget option does not mean you are cheap. It means you’re comparatively cheap when you consider the market as a whole.
A great example of this dichotomy is the smartphone industry. The cheapest new model will still set you back at least $50-100, not exactly budget.
Of course, if you do use cheap materials, you can lower your prices further and present yourself as a truly budget option, but that’s at the extreme end of the scale. The vast majority of products are not created to be cheap alternatives since consumers expect some measure of quality.
A phone that can barely load WhatsApp would probably sell poorly, after all.
There are some cons to this strategy.
You can quickly stray from low profit to no profit if your circumstances change. The difficulty with positioning yourself in this area comes with constantly having to monitor your operating costs, as even the tiniest increase will be a blow to your profits.
There’s also the factor of coming across as too cheap.
Generally, consumers are suspicious of products that are cheaper than others, even if reviews say that quality is consistent. It’s expected that certain types of products cost certain amounts, and any strategy that prices under this can be dismissed as being tacky.
Overall, this type of product development strategy is tricky to do but can perform wonderfully.
PDS type 3: Competitive
We’ve talked about the two extreme strategy types, but those are what they say on the tin, extremes. The vast majority of product development strategies fall somewhere in between, even if they do lean one way or the other.
Right in the middle of budget & luxury goods, you have competitive goods. These are products that have moderate profit margins and aim to sell a moderate amount of units.
How do you define moderate? A moderate price is determined by the average prices of that particular market as a whole. In other words, you price your product so it might be considered by the average consumer, keeping the quality consistent with what they’d expect for that price.
Let’s look at an example to make it clearer what this means.
When you think of high-end coffee, you might think of imported Jamaica Blue Mountain. On the other hand, if you want a low-budget option, you might settle for Dunkin’ Donuts’ own brand.
In the middle of these options sits Starbucks. Not too pricey and not low-quality. A good, reliable coffee shop that serves millions daily.
Starbucks occupies the competitive slot in this case, with their coffee being of a good enough quality to be called pleasant while keeping their prices low enough that they’re not a luxury brand.
Starbucks exemplifies the reason why most products are planned out to follow this route. You have the possibility of reaching almost all consumers, whether as a cheaper alternative to their luxury goods or as an upgrade from their usual once-in-a-while.
Your pricing strategy means that you make a decent amount of profit on each sale and aren’t that vulnerable to fluctuations in material costs or consumer tastes changing.
So what’s the catch? Why would anyone choose a different strategy than this, you might be asking?
Well, that’s precisely the reason. If everyone is aiming for this place in the market, then you’re simply one of a dozen.
Think of the last time you bought lightbulbs. Did you choose a specific brand, or did you just grab the first pack you saw on the shelf with a decent enough rating? Probably the latter.
When the market is saturated, you’re going to have a hard time establishing yourself as anything more than a face in the crowd. The reasons that brands want to choose this strategy are, paradoxically, the reasons that they can’t.
Not every coffee drinker goes to Starbucks, just as not everyone buys the same brand of shower gel. People buy what they’re used to, and unless you’re entering a market with something new and exciting, you’re simply going to fade away into the background.
Internal and external product development strategies – what’s the difference?
Now that we’ve talked about the different types of product development strategies, it’s time to take a brief note of… different types of product development strategies. ????
Hold on, this isn’t just a rehash of what we just spoke about, but something different entirely.
When you’re creating a new product, there are two different ways you can go about it. First off, you can utilize resources that you already possess, or you can look for possibilities that exist outside of these.
That’s what we call an internal vs. an external product development strategy.
Internal product development strategies
Internal product development typically refers to creating new products out of existing ones. That might be a personalized variant, a new and improved version of your product, or simply taking the ideas that exist within a product and applying them in new ways.
If you’re a smaller business or a start-up, you may find it hard to employ internal product development strategies since it’s possible you’ll lack the necessary resources. Look to the next section for how you might go about strategizing.
A common way for software companies to develop using internal product development is by acquiring smaller companies that produce complementary software, then combining them into a single package. This way, they can utilize their existing resources, which is far cheaper than creating new ones, and sell again as a new product.
Internal product development has several advantages, notably that you’ll already be established and can use the marketing from previous products to your advantage.
When Apple releases a new iPhone variant, for example, it’s always with the caption “the new iPhone” or “the upgraded iPhone” to allow consumers to subconsciously associate them with the success of previous versions.
Overall internal product development strategies are cheaper, easier to implement, and run far more smoothly on average since you probably know what you’re doing in this area.
On the flip side, there’s only so much you can do with an internal strategy since you’re limited by what you already possess. If you want to really innovate, you need to create an external product development strategy.
External product development strategies
External product development strategies are about creating something new. Something that your organization has never delved into before. This can be entering a new market, expanding into another country, etc.
External product development is a double-edged sword, however.
There are great rewards to be had with creating truly new, innovative products. Technological progress comes from external development, with giants like Thomas Edison & Nikola Tesla daring to be creative and develop something new.
However, this also comes at increased costs. After all, acquiring new assets takes funds, time, and effort, none of which are free.
When you create a new product using an external strategy, you could end up revolutionizing the future of electricity by patenting multiple electronic devices like Edison.
On the other hand, you could run out of money trying to build Wardenclyffe Tower like Tesla. The tower stood as a monument to human progress. However, it came at an extreme cost that couldn’t be recouped.
After all, it’s not enough in the world of business to simply innovate, you need to do it in a way that makes money and keeps your investors happy.
4 stages to creating a product development strategy
If you’ve read this far, you probably want to know how to go about creating a product development strategy.
To create one, you just need to follow the steps below. That’s it.
Go. ????
Stage #1: Defining your vision
First, you need to define your vision. This harkens back to our earlier discussion on the types of product development strategies you can use.
There are two questions that you can ask yourself when deciding what type of strategy is best.
Do you want to be a budget option, a luxury option, or a middle-of-the-road?
Do you intend to create something entirely new or to derive from existing assets?
To answer these, you need to have an idea of what you want to develop already in mind. Without this starting point, the entire plan falls apart.
Luckily, you can start with even the most ridiculous ideas. At this point, you’re not putting any material costs into the process, just time.
If you think your idea is too ridiculous, remember that someone once put their hand up in a board meeting and suggested a movie featuring “a tornado made of water with sharks in it.”
And it got sequels too!
Once you have your idea, you can start applying the potential options to it and seeing if they work.
Sometimes, you simply won’t be able to think of a place to market an idea, and that’s okay! Just file it away and move on to the next one until you find a concept you’re certain can fit one of these options.
Stage #2: Developing a strategic plan
Once you have your concept, it’s time to lay out a plan for how to create it.
The process of product creation can be as straightforward as designing a 3D file to send to a machine or as complex as mapping out a piece of software. Either way, it’s important to plan how you’re going to create it.
The strategic plan isn’t a step-by-step for how to produce your product. That comes later. Essentially, this is the process by which you link vision and reality, taking your concept and applying the first touch of real-world principles until you have a rough guide for how to begin.
The key idea here is to touch upon the real-world factors you’d need to consider, laying them out for future reference. It’s all about large strategic steps that might seem vague but are definitely necessary.
Remember, strategic plans aren’t the final word. They’re rough guides for how you want to go about your operations, with the actual details up in the air until they’re finalized. After all, you can’t predict how supply chains might look two years from now, so why finalize it right away?
Stage #3: Building a roadmap
Remember how we mentioned the step-by-step guide? This is it.
A product roadmap takes the broad steps of the strategy and breaks them down into recognizable, realizable steps. These are often built up over time and can be highly technical.
A roadmap is essentially a guide for how you will be bringing your product concept into being. It connects budgeting, assets, decisions that you need to make, and more.
When creating a roadmap, it greatly helps to keep things modular.
You might be thinking, what? Haven’t we just been talking about how important it is to keep everything running together?
So, when I say modular planning, I mean keeping every aspect of your roadmap separate yet connected.
Essentially, for each step of the journey, you need to keep it self-contained in such a way that it doesn’t depend on the previous steps having particular outcomes.
Let’s say you want to use a plastic-type material in your product, whatever that might be. You’ll need a machine that can utilize that plastic. You’re favoring polyurethane and have a machine in mind that can use it.
So what do you put down in your roadmap? Get polyurethane. Then, get a working polyurethane machine. No, no, no, you don’t do that. ????
When placing the polyurethane machine into your roadmap, you’ve essentially condemned yourself to alter your roadmap if your plan of using polyurethane falls through.
What does this mean? Remember how I talked about efficiency and lines of communication? The team looking into obtaining machines for you isn’t necessarily going to be the same one testing the materials. If you’ve placed a polyurethane machine into your roadmap, you’re going to have them running around looking for a machine that is no longer practical for you.
That’s time, effort, and money wasted.
Long story short? Make your planning modular in the early stages, so you don’t run into these issues.
Stage #4: Parallel innovation processes
The process of utilizing a product development strategy can be a tough one. How are you supposed to tie a long-term strategy into your daily operations?
Well, there’s an answer to that, and it lies in parallel innovation processes.
The trick to doing both at once is tying them together. Sure, you can try and run your daily operations independently, but that’s just asking to be led astray.
The key lies in having two systems in place:
A system for planning and budgeting in the long-term, often yearly.
A system for the short-term to explore possibilities and select emerging concepts, often monthly.
So how do you tie them in? The outputs from your long-term process become your inputs for the short-term.
In other words, you use the data you’ve gathered from your long-term vision projections as the starting points for your short-term.
You might think to yourself, what’s the benefit of doing this? Well, short-term planning without long-term management can be misguided, and the most crucial aspect of all is the budget aspect.
Every year there might be millions of product concepts thought up. However, you can only continue onto the creation process if you have the budget and assets to do so.
You can’t have your cake and eat it too. ????
The parallel innovation process keeps you on track to create only those products you’re capable of creating. Whether it’s due to budget restraints, technological limits, or simply a lack of resources, keeping your overall goal tied to the present circumstances will ensure you stay grounded.
That’s not to say that you can’t pick up ideas later on when circumstances change. Avatar had to wait almost a decade for special effects technology to catch up to James Cameron’s vision. In the meantime, Cameron devoted his attention to other projects.
The takeaway? Stick to what you can feasibly do.
Conclusion
So there you have it! You should now have everything that you need to create a workable, useful, and reliable product development strategy.
What’s next?
Once your product is out there in people’s hands, they’re going to have things to say. It’s imperative you’ll learn how to collect this data, analyze it, and use it to create better products. Check out our customer feedback analysis article to understand what needs to be done.
Know thy customer, and you will be able to please thy customer. When dealing with consumers, information is often lost in the hustle & bustle of everyday dealings. Few are able to fully utilize the signals their customers give in order to reap the rewards. Customer intelligence is aimed at doing just that.
It’s all about data in this age of e-commerce.
Once you have it, you’re working with first-hand accounts of how your customers wish to be treated, what they want to obtain, and how they think these things are to come about.
But data can be tricky to utilize effectively.
First of all, you have to obtain it. And not in any fishy manners if you want to build trust with your customers.
Secondly, the information provided by customers won’t be in a set format that’s easy to collate, making it difficult and time-consuming to process.
Finally, it’s very easy for these pieces of information to slip through the cracks and get lost, never making their way to the people who would be able to use them.
So, once you have this data, how do you go about using this valuable resource? The secret lies in the art of customer intelligence.
What is customer intelligence?
Customer intelligence is a catch-all term for analyzing customer data in order to find new ways to conform your business to their wants & needs.
While this might sound simple, it’s actually difficult in practice to achieve such an analysis due to the fact that consumers have different preferences.
Think of it like making coffee just the way someone likes it.
Sure, there are common factors between all of the cups you might make – coffee, milk, sugar, etc. – but there will be subtle differences that make the difference between a good cup of coffee and a great one. ☕
Customer intelligence can factor in those needs when potential customers approach you and vice versa.
It takes into account various data points such as age, location, habits, and more so that you can work with customers on an individual level. It means using all of the different combinations of these that might crop up when dealing with customers.
It’s no exaggeration to say that this is enough data to give anyone a headache!
As a consequence, utilizing customer intelligence is always done with the help of specialized software. It’s simply too much data for a human to process by hand in any useful amount of time.
Why is customer intelligence important?
In the age of the internet, and even more so following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, e-commerce has become more and more personalized.
It’s no secret that customers expect a personalized experience when dealing with a repeat seller, as 59% of them admit that it has an impact on their purchase decisions.
The customer experience has become increasingly relevant over the past few decades, with consumers following their hearts instead of cold numbers.
Many will even select an objectively inferior product or service if they deem the experience they have with the seller to be more pleasant. After all, customers cite bad experiences as their number one reason for switching brands or providers.
And how do you provide good experiences? By understanding their individual desires.
What can customer intelligence do for you?
After talking about how emotions are so crucial to business, it’s time to get down to some cold hard facts (I love my coffee with a hint of irony).
As mentioned, improving the customer experience is an excellent idea that will boost your bottom line.
In the next section, we dive into the details of how customer intelligence makes it possible. While more strategies exist, the ones we’ll lay out definitely pack the biggest punch. ????
Cross-selling & up-selling
It’s often quite rare for people to go to a shop for a single item and actually walk away with only that item.
There are just so many good deals that you can see, and you just have to try them out, right?
Online, things are different.
You can’t see the entire store out of the corner of your eye like you can in a brick-and-mortar location.
In fact, you’ll often only visit those pages directly relevant to the single item you’re looking for.
So, how do you show off your wares? Cross-selling and up-selling.
They’re both methods of encouraging customers to view items other than the one they specifically came to your site for, with cross-selling being concerned with complimentary products and up-selling with upgraded ones.
Essentially, they’re a means of getting a customer to want to spend more.
These can be done through advertisement banners, recommended product sections, and by related product sections on product pages.
The catch? Items often have multiple uses and reasons behind purchases, meaning you won’t necessarily know why an individual is after a certain product.
This makes cross-selling and up-selling a bit less effective.
But with customer intelligence at your disposal, you’ll have the information you need to nudge individuals toward their next purchase.
For example, a customer may purchase a DDR2 piece of RAM, a common computer part.
They might be after it because it’s what they currently have and need a replacement, in which case advising the DDR3 as an up-sell is valid.
Or, they might be working with a legacy computer, one not compatible with DDR3, in which case it wouldn’t be.
If you know which one is the case, you know which action to take.
Below you’ll see a great example of how Amazon utilizes cross-selling.
Amazon offers both a “for you” section as well as one on trending deals. You can clearly see a theme across the top row of items, showing its effectiveness at showcasing an individual’s tastes.
This dual-focus method ensures that while general items that are enjoyed by many are not ignored when it comes to cross-selling, the individual is also acknowledged.
Customer retention
Consumers have changed the way they operate in recent years, being more willing than ever to switch brands or providers over minor disagreements or small mistakes.
One of the biggest changes we saw was the rise of e-commerce transactions, with people turning more and more to ordering products online.
This makes the e-commerce customer experience critical for driving revenue. If your layout is confusing and the infrastructure is ancient, users will quickly become frustrated. And when that happens, they will easily leave your site in favor of another.
Seems plausible, right? When emotions run high, decisions are made that otherwise might not have been.
There’s a very real possibility that customers will leave your website if they don’t get the personalized, easy-to-use experience they want. When they do, that’s another customer lost.
And perhaps worse than just another purchase lost, it may be an existing customer that’s not coming back.
Low customer retention is one of the most damning factors when it comes to e-commerce profits, simply because customers cost much more to obtain than they do to keep.
While customer intelligence won’t solve your infrastructure issues, it will help improve other aspects of the customer experience immensely. With all that information you possess, you’re able to highly personalize the experiences each individual has to a great degree. Be it specific items or even your site’s layout.
Given a choice between these two options:
A simple cookie-cutter website that’s rigid and confusing.
A personalized experience on a website that responds to the way you use it and makes itself easier to navigate.
Which would you pick?
Channel analytics
When you’re running an e-commerce business, you’re often operating across multiple channels of communication. It’s not enough to simply use one social media platform, for example, as you’ll miss out on selling to those who use others.
But what works on one platform won’t necessarily work on the others. Not just because they operate differently but due to the audience that frequents each channel.
With customer intelligence on your side, you can not only measure customer behavior on an individual level but apply these principles to the different channels of communication you work with.
After all, if you have data on the individuals, it’s not hard to lump those together for group analysis.
Then, you’re able to easily translate the customer intelligence data into a form that applies to the individual channels and analyze it accordingly.
This can give you information on:
Different customer behaviors by channel.
Effectiveness of customer service in each channel.
How specific customer service tactics work with each channel.
Your ROI for each channel.
Sales tactic effectiveness by channel.
Useful, right? You can even use the information you gain from this analysis to determine whether or not it’s worth keeping a channel of communication open.
You might be thinking, why don’t I just perform an analysis on each channel? Surely that’s just as effective?
Well, yes and no.
You see, you can always use individual data as building blocks to create channel data, but you can’t do it the other way around.
This means that if you want to see how demographics affect each channel, you’d have to factor that into your data collection methods.
While that might seem like common sense, sometimes you’ll only think of analyzing a factor after the fact, meaning you’d need to do the whole data collection part all over again.
All-in-all, customer intelligence can always build up to a bigger picture, which is one of its most useful traits.
Optimization & cost-effectiveness
This one follows on from both customer retention & channel analytics, but it’s also its own thing, so a separate title is due.
On the surface level, increased customer retention means lower costs, and channel analytics means that you can optimize your approaches to each channel.
But it goes deeper than that.
When you deal with customers on the individual level, you’ll need to provide individual experiences. Customer intelligence lets you gain the information you need to provide this in a very short time frame, meaning you don’t waste time and money on ineffective techniques.
Overall, the information that customer intelligence provides means that every aspect of your organization can be streamlined, improved, and cut back when necessary. It cuts right to the heart of what customers want, which is the essence of e-commerce.
Brand loyalty
Loyal customers are hard to come by, but they’re well worth the effort to maintain.
In addition to the retention benefits mentioned above, loyal customers will act as advocates for your brand. It’s like having your own organic advertising department, except it’s free!
So, what do brand loyalty and brand equity have to do with customer intelligence?
The thing about loyalty is that it doesn’t just come overnight. You need to perform consistently well in order to build up loyalty.
While in face-to-face transactions, you can usually tell how the customer reacts to specific methods and adjust accordingly, you have no point of reference as to how to best approach a customer online.
So, how do you choose the best approach? Well, with customer intelligence, you can make educated guesses using an individual’s data.
This approach won’t be accurate in the beginning, however as time goes on and you gather more data on an individual, you will be able to adjust your approaches more effectively.
You might be thinking that this sounds like developing a relationship with that individual, and you’d be right. It’s simply done via software, as no human could ever keep up with that many individuals at once.
More effective approaches = more customer satisfaction = more loyalty.
The types of customer intelligence data
Generally speaking, customer intelligence data falls into two types, internal and external. The latter branches out into several other sub-types, but it’s quite straightforward and well worth familiarizing yourself with them.
It’s important to note from the get-go that both internal and external types of customer intelligence mix zero, first, and third-party data.
This means we recommend using both forms to gather as much relevant data as possible, especially as zero and first-party data becomes more and more precious with privacy concerns going up in recent years.
Internal customer intelligence
Internal data is the blanket term used to cover anything generated within your organization.
You can obtain internal data from your databases, point-of-sale systems, etc. The data that you receive from this won’t necessarily be different from that obtained externally, but it can be considered more organic and representative of a person’s true feelings than the data generated by prompted methods.
This data is the data that you don’t have to go out of your way to collect. It’s data that you’ve naturally picked up over the course of an individual’s interactions with you.
External customer intelligence
External data is what you get when you specifically gather customer intelligence data.
This data can be obtained via survey, from cookies, information that a user has been prompted to give to you, etc.
This data is often the more useful of the two types as it fills in the gaps and lets you see why certain methods are preferred, certain lines of communication are more used, etc.
You can split externally-gathered customer intelligence data into three types, personal, geographic, and attitudinal.
Personal data
Personal data is all about demographics. That can mean:
Age.
Career.
Disability status.
Education level.
Gender.
Income.
Marital status.
Religion.
All of this is incredibly useful when trying to personalize the experiences you can provide, not the least to avoid making irrelevant or even downright unhelpful changes.
There are many ways in which personalization can go wrong, but the more personal information you have, the greater your chances of making it go right.
Geographic data
This covers anything to do with location. It lets you know roughly where a person is when they buy from you.
Why is this important information? Surely when working online it’s all the same, right?
Well, no.
Certain tactics and strategies might work well in an urban environment but not in a rural one. Why? Because the people who live in these different places think in different ways.
Different environments create different experiences, which in turn means different habits are developed. While not exactly the same, there will be rough similarities in how people who live in the same city might behave online.
Similarly, there are probably differences between cities, states, and countries that need to be accounted for when drawing up plans.
Different geographies can also mean different delivery times, languages, tones, and more.
Attitudinal data
Attitudinal data is a little trickier to quantify, as it can change over time.
Effectively, it consists of any information on how an individual perceives your brand and the general emotions they feel towards it.
A useful tactic to gather such data is by going through review data.
This gives you a direct line to the voice of the customer, helping you understand strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and (what’s the T for swot?)
To complement the review data, you can conduct other market research methods like surveys, questionnaires, and focus groups. These can help you get a more rounded picture of attitudinal data.
The process of utilizing customer intelligence: 5 steps to follow
It’s time to get down and dirty.
When trying to utilize customer intelligence, there are five key steps that need to be taken. It’s important to keep these steps in order and not miss any out, as they’re all necessary to obtain a complete picture.
Keep in mind, however, that you can always cycle back a step if your data is confusing. If it’s hard to analyze, hard to decide what to do with, etc., you might just need more data or data from a different source.
Before we begin going over the steps, though, a brief disclaimer.
Customer intelligence is highly contextual, meaning that when you’re performing it you absolutely need to have your aims in mind.
You can’t just perform customer intelligence for the sake of it, as the algorithms and data collection methods will differ depending on what area of the customer experience you’re trying to take a look at.
That said, let’s begin.
???? Step 1: Sourcing
The first step in the process is to choose your sources.
While each source that you could draw from will give some amount of similar data, there are distinct differences between how they operate and what data you can obtain from them.
You can split sources into three types: transactional, behavioral, and psychographic. We’ll talk a little more about them later on.
???? Step 2: Collection
The second step is data collection.
Once you have your sources, you need to collect data from them. This can be done via website monitoring, heat maps, surveys, and more.
The data collection methods you should use are heavily dependent on the type of source you’re drawing from, so keep that in mind.
???? Step 3: Categorization
Next, you need to categorize your data.
This step is usually done while keeping the different facets of your organization in mind. If you’re looking to improve a specific area of your business, you should place the most weight on the relevant data.
Data can fall into the following categories:
Direct feedback, such as reviews & ratings.
Indirect feedback, such as comments & chatter.
Inferred feedback, such as history, cookies, and location-based data.
Direct feedback can be seen as a reflection of the customer experience, meaning it’s up to the marketing & customer service departments to use.
Indirect feedback is more broad but generally valuable for marketing & product testing departments.
Inferred feedback is all about website data, so it’s the domain of your dev team & design team.
All of these categories contain useful information, but some are more useful in specific contexts than others.
???? Step 4: Analysis
Once your data is all sorted into neat little packages, it’s time to analyze it.
This step is where customer intelligence software packages really shine. It’s one thing to know how to analyze data in theory, but a whole other ballpark to actually perform it.
Some common analyses methods that come pre-programmed include:
Customer lifetime value predictions.
Customer behavior modeling.
Predictive customer analysis.
Dynamic micro-segmentation.
Actionable insights.
Customer persona modeling.
One-to-one insight generation.
By using these pre-existing software packages, you’ll save yourself countless hours of hard work. We’ll discuss some of the platforms to generate customer intelligence available later on, as well as their features, advantages & disadvantages.
???? Step 5: Taking action
Finally, once your data has been analyzed, you need to take action.
This step is the crucial one where a lot of customer intelligence strategies fall apart. You see, in order to take action on your data, you need to be able to use the methods necessary to utilize it most efficiently.
Whether this is integrating new software into your website, adding this information to customer journey maps & workflows, or even altering your marketing campaign approaches entirely to account for different responses, you need to commit to these changes if you plan to get the most out of your data.
Change is scary, we can all agree on that, and many businesses would rather stick with tried and true methods than take a chance on something that may or may not work.
So why should you act on customer intelligence? Why should you risk your profit margins?
Simply put, if you’re thinking of these actions as entirely new strategies, you need to reframe your perspective on them.
Customer intelligence isn’t about telling you what to do. It’s about finding out what you already do, to some degree at least, that is the most effective.
When taking action, you’re not altering your direction, merely refining it.
You can use customer intelligence to measure responses to new methods, that’s true, but the information you gain is useful in all aspects of your organization.
What are the sources of customer intelligence?
As mentioned above, the different sources of your data will grant you different information on customer behavior.
Selecting your sources is the first step in the customer intelligence process, and making that selection depends heavily on what you’re trying to achieve.
So, what are the types, then? Well, they generally fall into three types, transactional, behavioral, and psychographic.
Transactional
Transactional data is all about purchase history.
Think back to the last few times you’ve ordered items online. There are probably several of those items that fit a trend or are even repeat purchases. Sound about right?
Purchases rarely take place in a vacuum, and what you buy today is likely going to have an impact on what you buy in the future.
In the same way, what customers have bought from you in the past will show trends that can indicate what they might want to buy next. Using these, you can tailor your recommendations, discounts, etc., to each individual’s tastes.
If you received a discount offer for a product you were thinking of buying in the future anyway, wouldn’t that tempt you to go through with it?
Behavioral
Behavioral data is concerned with customer behavior. In the realm of e-commerce, that translates to how they behave while using your website, emails, app, etc.
Now, you might be thinking, is it possible to track these factors? Well, yes.
With emails, I recommend tracking mostly clicks rather than opens. Clicks are a strong indicator of subscribers’ intentions, while opens are much weaker ones. Further, with Apple MPP causing inaccurate open data, it’s best not to rely on this metric as it can lead you to false conclusions.
On your website and app, you can track various metrics such as time on page, viewed products, abandoned pages, and much more. In fact, there’s so much data readily available that it’s best to hone in on your goals before diving into them.
Psychographic
Psychographic data is about customer intentions.
You can think of it as the underlying reasons behind purchases and what encourages someone to buy certain products.
You can get psychographic data in two ways.
First, there is the direct route where you simply ask them. Customer surveys, questionnaires, preference centers, and reading reviews all fall into this category.
Remember though, while customers are mostly honest when filling out these forms, they may not remember or even be aware of the full story. Thus, treat these answers wisely.
Secondly, there are indirect indications that can inform you about customer intentions.
Transactional & behavioral data are often the sources that lead to this type of psychographic data, as what they show allows you to infer factors that otherwise might have been missed.
To give an easy example, imagine you’ve just received an order for some hockey equipment. It can be described as:
Good quality.
All bright red or white.
Dispatched to New York.
These facts alone don’t tell you much about why the customer purchased these particular items. However, when you take a look at their purchase history, you find that a previous order was dispatched to Detroit.
Taken together, these two factors indicate that this person might be a fan of the Detroit Red Wings and was motivated to buy these particular items as they resemble the team’s uniform.
Indirectly obtained information can be wrong sometimes, as there can be factors that appear together simply by coincidence. When dealing with a customer for whom you have little information, this is expected, and you can adjust your software accordingly.
As time goes on and more evidence is gathered, you can relax and become more confident in your deductions.
After all, if it walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. ????
Customer intelligence platforms to help you understand up from down
The customer intelligence platform you should use will largely depend on what you intend to do with it.
Some are built for large-scale enterprises, some smaller, and some scale. There are also key differences in how each platform operates, with some being better than others at certain tasks.
As you can see in the below chart from SoftwareReviews, users of each platform rate them differently in two different yet equally important aspects, features & vendor experience.
Overall, you should look carefully at each option before you decide, but let’s go through some of the more commonly used ones and assess their capabilities.
Revuze
Not to toot our own horn, but the Revuze platform does a stellar job at gathering and analyzing data, providing you with easy-to-understand reports and insights.
Not only that, it does everything in real-time and in a couple of clicks.
This means that you can respond to customers’ needs and demands swiftly, allowing you to gain a crucial advantage over competitors.
But don’t take my word for it.
Our recent case study with Georgia-based grill innovator Char-Broil tells that story much better.
Adobe Analytics
Adobe Analytics, a part of the Adobe Experience Cloud, has the ability to interface with all other pieces of software within the Cloud. In particular, the AI-powered Adobe Target.
The downside? Like most Adobe products, it’s difficult to interface with software from other providers, so if you already use these, you’ll need to build an interfacing program to translate between the two.
Gavagai Explorer
Gavagai Explorer’s text analytics boasts multilingual features, quite useful for those working across borders.
It also boasts an API that allows for interfacing with third-party platforms, notably Slack, SurveyMonkey & Zendesk.
Pricing starts at $130 per month, with a limitation of 20 ongoing projects per user.
Graphext
Graphext is a Spanish company that supports six languages in its main version, with another four being in beta versions.
Their seamless translation abilities are particularly useful for those wanting to operate in Europe, Latin America, and South America, as English, Spanish & Portuguese are among the languages that have been fully developed.
Users have noted that Graphext is cloud-based and limited to small or medium businesses due to its capacity limits. The platform is also available to individuals for small use with zero charges.
The downsides? As a small company, Graphext isn’t able to easily respond to queries, only offering a text-based chat solution currently. They’re also fairly new and thus not well established in terms of API integrations.
Microsoft Dynamics 365
Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a Microsoft product line, so you know it’s going to be able to run on almost any Windows system. It’s also available in both cloud and on-site versions.
Dynamics boasts excellent ratings for usability, good ratings for support, and mixed reviews for its user interface options.
As a Microsoft-provided app, it also boasts the ability to interface with dozens of third-party applications. It speaks the same language as your operating system, after all.
One complication is that Dynamics is not one app but a series of twelve applications. Naturally, these all seamlessly work together. However, for those working on mobile devices, this isn’t ideal.
Optimove
Optimove CI is known for its user-friendly interface, flexibility, and easy learning curve.
As an organization founded in 2009, Optimove has had a long time to refine its processes. It’s known for great database organization abilities, as well as for learning exactly what customers want.
One of their greatest strengths, according to reviewers, is its very visual interface which makes visualizing concepts easy.
Downsides quoted include manual importing of data, issues with integrations, and an inability to delete templates which can quickly leave you swamped in them.
People Pattern
People Pattern comes from a US-based company operating outside of Silicon Valley. It’s rated highly for its data import abilities and its analytics but less highly for support & integrations.
One aspect that sets People Pattern apart from its contemporaries is its highly-rated customization abilities, which users have cited as their main reasons for purchase.
On the flip side, this software is only really useful for small & mid-size businesses or individuals.
Signal CI Platform
Signal’s main pros are all about integration and scalability. That said, ease of use isn’t quite up to standard with some of the other platforms on this list.
Signal CI also suffers from dataset size limitations, making it unideal for larger businesses. It more than makes up for this, however, with its Rules Engine feature that allows for automatic data filtering during collection & segmentation.
Overall, a solid choice for anyone from individuals to medium-sized enterprises.
Takeaways
Customer intelligence can be tricky to get to grips with, but once you’re more familiar, you’ll have access to a wealth of customer information.
Ultimately, customer intelligence in e-commerce is driven by the need to personalize and customize the user experience, lest you be left behind by others who do this more effectively. It’s one thing to know what your data says you need to do and another to actually put that into action.
Fortunately, we’ve recently published an article on that very topic, so check out our complete guide to e-commerce personalization next, so you can put your customer intelligence insights into action!
Customer feedback is a treasure trove of information with a wealth of insights to offer businesses seeking to improve products and boost revenue. But having feedback is not enough on its own. To understand what customers tell you, employing customer feedback analysis is a must, especially when done at scale. Learn what it means and how to do so successfully.
One of the most impactful approaches you can take to help your business grow is to become a customer-centric company.
Because not only do customer-centric companies win over the loyalty of their audience for the long term, but they also see the financial benefit of doing so, being 60% more profitable than their competitors.
In order to truly center your business around your customer, you’ll need to create a culture that commits to listening and catering to the customer’s opinions, thoughts, and needs. And there is no better tool for this than customer feedback analysis.
By allowing you to systematically and regularly tap into your customers’ opinions, customer feedback analysis enables you to make smarter, more strategic business decisions that help you retain a highly loyal customer base.
In this article, we review everything you need to know about how to successfully implement customer feedback analysis in order to improve business outcomes.
What is customer feedback analysis?
To understand what customer feedback analysis is and why it’s so important to modern businesses, let’s break the term down into its parts.
The customer part of customer feedback analysis
The customer, or the individual or entity that makes a purchase from your company, is absolutely key to your business’s success.
As much effort as we may spend in building audiences, courting prospects, and attracting users, it is ultimately the paying customer who directly contributes to your bottom line.
In understanding your customers, their needs, their pain points, and their opinions of your brand and your product, you’ll be able to make strategic decisions to improve e-commerce customer experience and customer satisfaction, and boost revenue as a result.
The feedback part of customer satisfaction analysis
Customer feedback is all of the qualitative and quantitative data you receive from your customers that reflect their opinions, preferences, and concerns as they relate to your industry, company, and product.
Feedback may be solicited or unsolicited and can come in several forms, including written comments as well as scores and ratings.
The analysis part of customer feedback analysis
Customer feedback is a form of raw data that contains a multitude of valuable insights for your company.
It is the process of analysis that helps you take this raw data, structure it, and explore it in order to find patterns, identify problems, and extract actionable insights that you can implement in order to make improvements to your product and processes.
Satisfied customers are the lifeblood of a successful business.
By creating a superior, satisfying customer experience, you are motivating customers to take a number of desirable actions, including
Paying more.
Recommending your business/products to others.
And coming back for repeat purchases.
Indeed, 86% of customers are willing to pay up to 16% more for a superior customer experience. Further, a better retention rate is paramount for businesses seeking growth as existing customers are easier to sell to and are likely to pay more for new products than first-time customers.
Customer feedback analysis holds the key to creating an exceptional customer experience that keeps your customers coming back for more.
By collecting, analyzing, and acting on the insights you find in customer feedback, you will be able to give customers what they want, address any problems, and gain a reputation as a customer-centric company like massively popular and successful brands.
How do you analyze customer feedback?
While analyzing customer feedback isn’t as simple as throwing numbers at a computer, it doesn’t have to be overly complicated.
In the next section, we break the process into five steps. And when working with dedicated customer feedback analysis tools, you can even skip most of them.
Step 1: Collecting customer feedback
The first step of customer feedback analysis is collecting customer feedback. Here are a few important sources of customer feedback.
Customer calls, chats, and helpdesk emails
This unsolicited form of customer feedback is incredibly valuable, as it represents problems and concerns that customers feel strongly enough about to have actively contacted your company to discuss.
For this reason, it is best practice to automate a system in which helpdesk emails and customer service call transcripts are automatically added to a feedback database.
In this chatbot conversation from TheKnowledgeGym, a customer shares important feedback, including how they found a brand, how often they use its product, how they use the product, and more.
Surveys
There are a number of customer satisfaction surveys that are commonly used to collect customer feedback. These include:
Net Promoter Score (NPS) – This metric measures how likely customers are to recommend your company to a friend or family member.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) – This metric measures customer satisfaction by directly asking how satisfied customers are with a product, service, or customer service interaction.
Customer Effort Score (CES) – This metric measures how hard or easy a customer finds a product or service to use.
You can solicit answers to these surveys through a number of channels, including your website, your mobile app, text message, and email. Individually – and even more so collectively – these surveys can all reveal highly valuable data about customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Here, clothing company Hem & Stitch uses an NPS survey to measure customer loyalty.
Social media comments and messages
Your social media is a fantastic source of customer feedback, with many users these days preferring to reach out to a company with a problem or question over Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram rather than through traditional customer service channels.
Like with customer calls and emails, it is recommended to automatically forward communication received over social media to your feedback database.
However, not all mentions of you on social media will occur on your account, and not all will tag you. For example, a customer might tweet their opinion about your product on their own personal Twitter account without using any tags or hashtags to alert you to the mention.
For this reason, it’s wise to engage in an ongoing practice of social listening, or actively monitoring social media in order to find mentions of your brand, even if it’s untagged.
On Twitter, users are regularly mentioning and posting feedback about brands and products without tagging them.
Online reviews
A final source of customer feedback that we highly recommend tapping into is the online review, a go-to place for customers to share their opinions. You may be able to find reviews of your company in a number of places including:
Through your own website.
Through general review websites like Yelp and Google Reviews.
Through industry-specific review websites like MakeupAlley or Angi.
On the app store if you have a mobile app.
Reviews on marketplaces such as Amazon, Etsy, and eBay.
A customer shares a wealth of important feedback about a product’s color, quality, and sizing through an Amazon review.
Step 2: Structure raw data
Once you have collected customer feedback data, you’ll be the proud owner of a giant mountain of unstructured data. In order to be able to learn something from this information, you’ll have to find a way to organize and categorize it into something more useful.
First, we recommend going over the data to identify important keywords such as product names, locations, features, etc. Then, you’ll be able to organize the data into categories, which will allow you to identify trends in the data.
Great, now we have neat and ready-to-analyze data. What’s next?
A great way to draw insights from your data is to categorize it. There are endless ways to do that, so it’s important to know what you’re looking for before starting.
Here are some ideas to get you inspired:
Topic – If you seek feedback on a specific topic, such as price, delivery speed, or sizing, it is best to categorize data by topic.
Sentiment – An approach that is often helpful is to split feedback up by whether it is positive, neutral, or negative. Sentiment analysis is one of the best ways to keep informed on how your product is doing.
Type of feedback – Another option is to categorize based on what the feedback is aiming to do. This can be customers that complain, suggest a new product, request a new color, etc.
Priority – Some feedback may point to something that needs urgent fixing, like a bug. This is why it can be helpful to organize by priority ranging from less to more urgent.
Customer type – You may find useful insights by splitting up feedback by customer type, including paying, trial, non-paying, premium, or VIP/rewards status.
Location – If your company has multiple locations or is international, you can categorize feedback by city, state, or country.
Product – If you have multiple products, it may be helpful to group feedback by which product it pertains to.
Structuring raw data is something that can be done manually.
However, not only is it incredibly time-consuming, but error-prone humans are liable to make mistakes every now and then.
Instead, most companies will rely on some form of technology for this step, whether it’s simpler Excel sheets or more sophisticated dedicated data structuring software.
Step 3: Identifying insightful data
The next step is to separate the insightful data – or new data that either confirms a hypothesis you had or contradicts your prior working assumptions – from non-insightful data, which is data that points to an issue you already knew about.
When determining whether or not data is insightful, ask yourself:
Does this data validate a hypothesis we had?
Can this data motivate us to think more critically?
Can this data lead us to take action to make an improvement?
Can this data reshape our strategies?
For the rest of the steps of customer feedback analysis, you can set aside the non-insightful data to focus exclusively on the insightful data.
Step 4: Write a customer feedback analysis report
A customer feedback analysis report is a document summarizing the findings of your customer feedback analysis and laying out recommendations for how to follow up.
How do you write a customer feedback analysis report? We recommend including the following five key sections.
???? Background – Discuss your company’s current state and why you are engaging in customer feedback analysis. Lay out any hypotheses you may have about what you might find in the data. Mention any relevant changes that the company has made recently.
???? Methodology – Explain how you conducted your customer feedback analysis. Review what sources of feedback you used, how you structured your raw data, what tools you used, what your sample size was, and any other relevant details.
???? Results – Display your data in as easy-to-understand a way as possible. Quantitative data can be displayed through graphs and charts. For qualitative data, you may want to choose select quotes to display that demonstrate relevant trends in the data.
???? Analysis – Discuss the insights that you found in the data. What problems came up, if any? What new features or products did your customers request? What surprised you? Were your hypotheses confirmed or contradicted?
???? Recommendations – Make your recommendations for the next steps. Based on the insights you found, what actions can your company take in order to improve business outcomes?
Step 5: Act on insights
It’s important to emphasize that customer feedback analysis is only the beginning of a process of ongoing improvement.
Feedback analysis can serve as an arrow pointing the way in a direction that your company can go in order to improve customer satisfaction and experience.
It’s up to you to follow the arrow and fix the problems, create new products, and make the tweaks your customers ask for.
Example of customer feedback analysis
Let’s say you own a start-up that built an app customers can use in order to identify problems in their house plants, such as pests, underwatering, and insufficient sunlight. One of your company’s values is being data-driven, and you aim to become the go-to plant diagnosis app by becoming customer-centric and offering the features customers will prefer most. For this reason, you have decided to implement an ongoing customer feedback analysis process.
You choose to collect customer feedback through several channels including:
App store reviews.
NPS, CSAT, and CES surveys.
Social media mentions.
Customer calls, emails, and chatbot messages.
Once you gather a sufficient sample size of customer data, your business decides to categorize it by topic into the following groups:
Feedback about pricing.
App bugs.
Feature requests.
Once you’ve removed non-insightful data and used an AI tool to group your insightful data into the relevant categories, your business intelligence team generates the following important insights from your data:
Trial users aren’t converting into paid users because they feel that the monthly price of the app is too high.
Customers are expressing interest in a feature that allows them to browse photos of other plants with the same issue as theirs.
Based on these insights and your BI team’s customer feedback analysis report, your company has decided to lower the monthly subscription fee by 10% and begin work on building the new feature your customers asked for.
Customer feedback analysis and acting on it isn’t some pie-in-the-sky process. It’s something you can do, and your competitors are most likely already doing it.
Customer feedback analysis tools
As we mentioned above, manually conducting customer feedback analysis can be challenging.
The manpower required to go through hundreds or thousands of comments, transcripts, and messages is tremendous, requiring more resources and time than many companies have to spare.
To help you be more efficient and accurate in your customer feedback analysis, here are some tools worth looking into.
Revuze
Revuze is a powerful insights tool that uses AI technology in order to automatically collect unstructured customer feedback data from multiple sources, structure it, and organize it into granular, actionable insights.
Revuze’s machine learning algorithm operates independently to discover relevant topics and trends within the data and analyze sentiment in order to accurately report on customer satisfaction.
This is a great all-in-one customer feedback analysis solution perfect for implementing a more efficient, scalable customer feedback analysis strategy than what you’d be able to achieve by hand.
Typeform
Typeform is an online survey creator known for being highly intuitive and user-friendly. This tool is great for building and sending out customer satisfaction surveys in order to collect feedback to analyze.
Power BI
Power BI is Microsoft’s interactive data visualization software that can help you create reports and model the customer feedback data you collect.
By helping give you a clearer, more visual picture of your data, Power BI can help you better understand it in order to reach valuable insights.
What comes after analyzing customer feedback?
In today’s consumer landscape, it takes more than a great product to win market share.
The modern consumer seeks an exceptional customer experience from brands that makes them feel seen and understood.
In order to satisfy customers, win their loyalty, and gain a brand reputation as a company that puts customers first, you need to tune into what customers are saying about you, what they want from you, and what changes they’re asking for.
Customer feedback analysis is an incredibly powerful process that allows you to keep your finger on your customers’ pulse in order to remain on top of things and continually deliver a delightful experience.
Best of all? With the right tools, you can automate and optimize these workflows so they can become an integral part of your process without eating up all of your time.
Analyzing your customers’ feedback is a never-ending process. One way to gain insights into the minds of your customers is by conducting focus groups. But to make the most out of them, you’ve got to ask the right questions. Find out more in our blog on the topic.
Focus group questions allow discussion to be used as a means of gaining detailed qualitative information. From issues regarding PR to product specifications, nothing brings more information than an in-depth, interactive conversation. Find out below how to ask the right focus group questions to understand the market better.
Focus groups can be highly useful, but too often, you won’t get the information that you need from them. They have disadvantages; whether that’s due to misinterpretations, misunderstandings, or simply recording information the wrong way, you can end up more confused than when you started.
Focus group questions can lead to confusing & conflicting information if not asked in the correct manner.
The key to great focus groups appears before you’ve even opened your mouth, and that’s writing excellent focus group questions.
In this piece, we’re going to help you nail this aspect. We’ll talk a bit about focus groups, and discuss use cases, but – more importantly – we’ll provide you with dozens of amazing focus group questions that will help you refine your market research and understand what your customers want and need.
Sometimes, it’s not what you say but how you say it that makes the difference.
What are the four types of focus group questions?
Focus groups function similarly to any conversation or debate you might have. You need to break the ice and introduce the main topics in a way that is easy to understand.
There are four types of focus group questions you can ask, and these should be used no matter the topic that you’re exploring.
These consist of:
An introduction.
A prompt.
A discussion.
And a way to wrap up the discussion without leaving anything unsaid.
In that way, focus groups are similar to an essay or article in structure.
Let’s take a look at the four types in more depth and learn why they’re necessary.
Introductory focus group questions
Introductory questions are the foundations upon which your group will form their discussion.
Essentially, introductory questions set the stage for what is to come next. They’re ideal for ensuring that everyone is on the same page, but more importantly, they allow the group members to relate to one another.
They should be simple and easy to answer, as it can prove difficult for participants to answer fully and honestly to strangers.
Introductory questions also serve as a means to gauge everyone’s experiences with the topic that you will be discussing. Someone who’s been interacting with you on a monthly basis will have more insight on the topic compared to someone who does so once in a blue moon.
Some examples of introductory questions might be:
❔ “Welcome to our focus group. Today, we’ll be discussing [topic]. Could each of you please share a story about how you’ve interacted with [topic] recently?”
❔ “Hello, and welcome to our focus group. How did everyone find the journey here?”
❔ “We’re [brand], and today we’re leading this focus group. Can you tell me when you last bought something from us?”
In each of the above examples, a context is given, and a simple question is asked. While these might seem irrelevant to the larger discussion, you should always ensure that the results are noted down for context.
Information is power.
Exploratory focus group questions
These are the sparks that will light a fire in your participants.
Exploratory questions are always directly linked to the topic that you intend to gather information on and are designed to provoke discussion among the group.
These questions should be carefully designed with customer personas in mind so as to steer the conversation in the direction that you desire.
Each exploratory question should be specific enough to determine what your group will discuss but vague enough so that there isn’t a straightforward and easy answer.
While that might sound paradoxical, remember your aim is to get your participants talking, not simply to get a yes or no answer.
Some exploratory questions that you might ask are:
❔ “Could you give me an example of a bad experience you had with us?”
❔ “If you could choose {this feature} or {that feature} when looking for product features, which would you pick and why?”
❔ “What alternative features do you think we should include with our product?”
Follow-up focus group questions
Follow-up questions happen in the discussion period and are intrinsically linked to exploratory questions. They’ll always come after an exploratory question has been asked and are related to that specific discussion.
Because of this, some analysts might place them within the same category. However, there are distinct differences between the two.
The key difference is their focus. Exploratory questions are vague. They’re designed to provoke a whole host of potential opinions from coming forth.
Follow-up questions are precisely the opposite. They’re designed to get pinpoint accurate information on how your participants feel, think, and might act.
Some examples of follow-up questions are:
❔ “You said that you dislike this feature. Why specifically would you say that?”
❔ “You’ve pointed out that there isn’t much flexibility. How would you go about improving that if you were the designer?”
❔ “When you use this item, you said you felt frustrated. Could you tell me a little bit more about what frustrates you about it?”
In each of the above examples, context is taken from the previous discussion and used to form the question.
It can be very tricky to write follow-up questions in advance since they’re so intrinsically linked to how the discussion evolves. Humans are unpredictable factors, and these discussions don’t always go in a direction that you anticipate.
After all, if you could perfectly predict what people were going to say, what would be the point of a focus group?
The key to forming good follow-up questions is thinking on your feet. It’s not easy, but if you know the topic well, you should have an idea of what information you need and how to aim these questions correctly.
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Exit questions are exactly what they say on the tin, questions designed to end the discussion and wrap up the focus group.
While it might seem easy, there are several factors that you should keep in mind.
Not everyone may have gotten to air their opinion fully over the course of the discussion.
Someone may want to mention something tangentially related.
Even with hours and hours, you’ll never be able to predict every facet of the topic that someone may want to mention.
Exit questions are designed to solve these issues. Essentially, their purpose is to ensure that you get all of the information you can possibly get out of your focus group.
Let’s take a look at some examples:
❔ “Thank you for your time. Before we wrap up, is there anything that you’d like to mention?”
❔ “Do any of you think there’s something that we missed in our discussion today?”
❔ “If we were to cover other factors involved, which do you think would be most relevant to the discussion we’ve had today?”
Each of these is short and to the point, but also open to interpretation. This way, any information not already given can be obtained with ease.
Are you ready for even more focus group questions?
Focus group questions examples to focus your participants
Describing the four stages of questions in an abstract sense is all well and good, but how do you make it relevant to your topic?
Don’t fret, for we’re here to provide you with some fantastic examples of focus group questions. Each of the following sections will contain several questions on a specific topic, as well as some general advice on how to use them.
Remember, though, context is key! Be sure to mold the questions to fit your business, your products & services, and your way of doing things.
Focus group questions for new products
❔ “Were we to create an updated version of [product], what features would you like to see added?”
Features are the backbone of most products, and unfortunately, you can’t usually put them all into a single package. This is especially true of physical products but applies to software too.
When asking this question, you gain insight into what features that were left off would be of use to your customers, and by delving deeper with follow-up questions, you can find out why. By using this information, you can make your product better in the next iteration.
❔ “Who or what product do you think would rival any new launch we put out?”
There’s no use in launching a brand-new updated product if your competition surpasses it a week later. Knowing who and what your customers would view as competition lets you know what you have to account for in your marketing and placement strategies.
Remember, customer perception doesn’t always equal reality. You might judge your competition by cold, hard facts, but the general public won’t have access to all your information. It’s entirely possible for an inferior product to beat you out.
❔ “Would you be interested in beta testing the new version of [product]?”
Not only will the use of this question potentially gain you willing testers that are enthusiastic about your latest releases, but it allows you to see whether your customers are interested in testing products before launch and/or becoming involved in the design process.
Focus group questions for marketing
❔ “How did you first come across us?”
If you know where your marketing strategies are seeing the most engagement, you’ll be able to judge how well they’re doing.
This question is most often used in surveys where you can judge proportions from a high number of responses but is useful in focus groups too.
The discussion that comes with a focus group can reveal not only where customers first encountered you, but what their thought processes were afterward.
❔ “When you shop online for [product], what sites do you generally use?”
While not directly related to your brand, knowing where your customers would look to find a specific product or service tells you where you should prioritize your efforts.
To use a rather extreme analogy, there’s no use putting up a great big billboard in the middle of New York if your customer base is located in Los Angeles.
❔ “What methods of communication with us do you prefer?”
In the 21st century, there are dozens of different ways in which you can communicate with others.
The problem is, different demographics have preferences for different means, so which do you choose? Well, you ask.
Your customer will generally have qualities in common with each other, and one of those is communication methods. You’re likely to have more than one demographic of customers, so expect different answers here depending on who you ask.
❔ “How often would you prefer for us to communicate with you?”
If you’re anything like the average person, you probably get newsletters & similar email marketing materials that you subscribed to but don’t actually read.
While it’s a harmless nuisance to most email users, what you might not know is that unopened newsletters can actually harm your credibility as an email sender! Oh no!
By matching your customers’ schedules on when they prefer to receive communications from you, you can ensure that they’re more likely to actually open and read them as opposed to simply deleting them, or worse, sending you to the spam folder.
While a focus group is a great start to understanding your customers’ preferences, creating an email preference center where each subscriber can tell you exactly how they want you to communicate with them is a must.
❔ “Would you consider our advertisements intrusive, or say that they know too much? If so, where have you experienced this?”
When dealing with personalization, there’s a fine line between being relevant and coming across as knowing a scary amount of details about you. Computers, which we rely on for advertisement algorithms, aren’t the best at knowing where the line is; bless them.
A key factor in e-commerce is product recommendation, however, you need to balance that against coming across too strongly. Once you’ve identified the areas in which your advertisements put customers off, you can reassess the methods you use in order to lessen further damage.
Customer experience
❔ “How has your opinion of us shifted in the past X amount of months/years? Why would you say that is?”
Customer experience isn’t static, and knowing how opinions are shifting can help you decide whether your CX strategies are working or not.
One thing to keep in mind when asking this question is that time periods and the experiences tied to them are highly contextual, and the specific events happening around that time need to be taken into account.
❔ “Do you use our products more than you did in the past? Or would you say your usage is decreasing?”
Customer interactions are the basis of customer experience. You can’t say you’ve experienced something if all you did was observe it from afar, after all.
This question aims to judge how these customer interactions are progressing and whether or not you need to make changes to your strategies in order to retain customers.
Once again, this question is highly contextual. As the worldwide COVID-19 restrictions come to an end, a disposable mask manufacturer would expect purchases to decrease. This wouldn’t be a CX red flag for them, as the underlying reasons behind the drop aren’t within their control.
❔ “Are there any particularly positive experiences you’ve had with us? What made them stand out?”
When dealing with customers, it’s the standout experiences that affect opinions more than most.
Let’s say you’ve had a particularly rough day, and the cafe you go to is busy. You don’t expect much, but the person behind the counter notices your bad mood and tries to cheer you up.
You’d remember that more than if they simply gave you your order and waved you away, right?
Standout experiences let you know when your brand went the extra mile and can give you a blueprint as to how to perform brilliant customer service in the future.
❔ “Are there any particularly negative experiences you’ve had with us? What made them stand out?”
On the other hand, there are bad experiences that stand out too.
To use the analogy from above, you’ve had a terrible day, and when you drop by the cafe, your coffee is cold! “That’s it,” you say to yourself. “I’m never coming here again!”
While not exactly a fair and rational judgment, it’s nevertheless the thought process that many of your customers (or ex-customers?) would follow if they had a particularly bad experience with you.
These experiences provide a blueprint of what not to do, essentially, as they’re the events that stuck in the minds of your participants as particularly bad. While it’s unfortunate that they had these experiences in the first place, you can turn them into teaching moments to ensure that they aren’t repeated.
❔ “From your experiences, can you say what you expect when purchasing something from us?”
Experiences create expectations. That’s true whether you’re talking about business or baseball, and the experiences that your customers have with you will shape what they will come to expect from their interactions.
Sometimes these experiences are controllable and influenceable, sometimes not. The key is to identify which parts of said experiences & expectations you can replicate and make a part of your repertoire.
Focus group questions for customer perception
❔ “Would you recommend our brand to others? Why/why not?”
This question lets you get to grips with one of the basic questions of customer perception, whether or not you’re a brand to recommend to others.
While it’s not absolutely essential in business to have customer advocacy, it is a huge boost to your sales ability without you having to spend a penny.
❔ “What made you choose us over the alternatives?”
The root differences between you and your competition reveal a lot about how your brand is perceived. Knowing what you do better than others allows you to maintain an edge, whether that’s an advertisement, product features, or simple availability.
❔ “What would make you choose an alternative over us?”
On the other hand, there are always things that your competition will have the edge in. By identifying these, you can factor them into your product strategy and hopefully overcome any weaknesses it possesses.
❔ “Where would you expect to find our products?”
Are you a part of the eye-level shelf where the premium brands lie or are you on the bottom shelf with the discounts? Are you found solely in specialized stores, or could you be found in a supermarket?
When you know exactly where your customers expect to find you, it can tell you a lot about how they view you.
❔ “When you compare [product] to the previous version, how well do you think we incorporated customer wants & needs?”
This one is applicable to all types of products barring those expected to last a lifetime but is mostly aimed at those with short lifetimes.
Essentially what you’re asking is, “do your customers feel heard?” which has been rated as one of the most essential qualities for a brand to possess.
Focus group questions for competitor research
❔ “If you intend to buy [product], what brand comes to mind besides us?”
When you think of a certain product, there are usually go-to brands that you’ll look for, no?
In most cases, there is more than one brand that fits the bill. Knowing who your customers think of besides you when looking for a certain product allows you to identify your biggest rivals on a practical level.
❔ “Who do you see as our biggest rival? The Xbox to our Playstation, if you will?”
Sometimes you may have a direct competitor, and sometimes not. It’s always useful to see who your customer base sees as an alternative, even if, in practice, they might not purchase from them due to said rivalry.
❔ “Is there any situation where you’d prefer our competitor’s product to ours? Why is that?”
Specifics are key here. You should ask your participants to provide information on features, availability, etc., in order to judge these situations and how you might turn them to your advantage.
❔ “What would you recommend we do to become more useful/enjoyable than [competitor]?”
Specifics are good. By narrowing the field to a single competitor, you allow specific strengths of theirs to come to light, ones which you can learn from.
When you delve further into this topic, you can use follow-up questions to find out why these competitors are preferred to you.
❔ “In what areas does [product] succeed where its competitors fail?”
In the world of product design, it’s often more important to be better than the other option than it is to simply be good. By finding out where you stand out, you can ensure that future versions maintain and amplify these qualities to retain customers.
Focus group questions for branding
❔ “When you see our brand, what immediately springs to mind?”
Knowing what gut reactions customers have to your brand is important. These feelings are the root motivations behind every interaction that they will ever have with you. Knowing what customers feel will allow you to shape the way you interact with them in the future.
❔ “How much more would you be willing to pay for our products over an alternative?”
Brand equity is the ability to charge more for products with your logo on them. It’s a form of trust and it shows that customers value your brand highly.
By asking this question, you’re able to both measure your brand’s value and quantify it with a numerical value (often a percentage).
❔ “What kind of reputation does our brand have when it comes to X?”
Of course, a brand can have a good reputation overall but a bad reputation when it comes to certain practices.
Knowing precisely how you are viewed in certain circles is key to improving your practices, as well as maintaining the ones in which you are held in high regard.
❔ “Can you name a few positive aspects of our brand?”
Another vague question, this one allows you to open the topic to any and all answers, not simply the ones that you anticipated.
By asking about the positive aspects of your brand, you’re going to know what to continue doing in order to keep customers loyal.
❔ “Can you name a few negative aspects of our brand?”
On the flip side, there are going to be negative aspects, no matter how hard you try to purge them.
By knowing your weaknesses, you can improve upon them. Remember, these are merely the negative aspects in the minds of customers and can be inaccurate!
If that’s the case, you should look to spreading awareness about your practices rather than improving them.
Focus group questions for industry trends
❔ “Have you noticed any new trends in our industry recently?”
While you’re certainly going to want to keep on top of industry trends, there’s always a chance that you’ll miss something or simply not be able to see it because of perspective bias.
Not only can your focus group identify trends that you may have missed, but you’ll also get information on their perspective about what’s going on in the industry and what they expect to change in the coming months.
❔ “What sources do you get your industry news from?”
When you’ve identified where your customers obtain their news, you can look to involve yourself with these sources further.
Whether that’s interviews, collaborations, etc., becoming more visible to your target audience should be your aim.
❔ “Is there anything in our industry that you think is lacking?”
Industries are made up of businesses, which are made up of people, and people miss things sometimes.
There’s every chance that customers are looking for something but haven’t been able to find it because it simply doesn’t exist in the industry yet. If you’re the one who asks them about it first, you’re the one who gets a leg up on the competition.
❔ “Are there any individuals or publications that you see as industry experts and would trust their opinion?”
Whatever the industry, there are always those big-name sources or people with lots of letters after their names that are trusted more than anyone else.
Why? Well, mostly it’s because they’re seen as knowing what’s up. They can tell the good stuff from the bad, the value-for-your-money from the ripoffs.
Whether these big names are actually experts, that’s largely irrelevant. The important thing is that your customer base will think they are, so it’s best to either get them on your side or avoid their wrath.
❔ “When you’re keeping up with our industry, what type of content do you prefer to engage with?”
Knowing what type of content your customers engage with is just as important as knowing where they look to obtain it.
Short-form vs. long-form, essays vs. articles, technical specifications vs. overall statistics, all of these are different forms of content that say and do different things. If you know which of these is preferred, you can keep your industry engagement in those forms so as to appeal to your customer base.
You’ll likely have more than one type of customer, which means you’ll have more than one type of content that is preferred.
Focus group questions for positive aspects of your products
❔ “When using [product], what are you always satisfied with?”
By using the term “always,” you ensure that you receive the most positive aspects of your product. You can also use this question as a starting point to rank product features and aspects, asking when they are “mostly satisfied” and “usually satisfied.”
❔ “What situation would make you reach for [product], as opposed to an alternative?”
Asking for the motivations behind the purchase will grant you insight into customers’ thought processes. The strengths that are the root causes of their purchase are what you should aim to obtain, whatever those may be.
❔ “What made you decide to purchase [product]?”
This question allows for any motivation behind the purchase to shine through, even some that you may not expect. Sometimes products have uses that even the creators didn’t think of!
❔ “When you first saw [product], what stood out to you?”
When looking through the eyes of someone unfamiliar with a product, the first things they see will shape their experiences with it. Ensuring that you know which features are the most prominent will allow you to influence that first encounter in a positive way.
❔ “What features of [product] are the most useful to you?
Product purchases are driven by their usefulness. If you know what features are essential, you can ensure that those are preserved and advertised further in the future.
Conducting a focus group vs. a survey
A focus group is a small group of people who are brought in and asked questions about their experiences with your brand. You ask them questions, they answer, and you analyze the results.
So what makes this any different from customer satisfaction surveys or other forms of collecting feedback? Why should I bother bringing a group of people into a room together when I can just as easily send out emails?
The answer to that is simple, and it lies in group dynamics.
You see, in a focus group, the participants don’t just rattle off answers like a computer. They talk about them with others and can come to conclusions that an individual couldn’t reach alone.
Ever had a feeling that you needed to put into words but never could, only for someone else to describe it perfectly? That’s the type of interaction that can happen in focus groups.
While surveys can give clean, easy-to-analyze answers, they often lack the depth that focus groups can provide.
If you’re looking to the future and offering “what-if” scenarios, a focus group’s in-depth discussion will give you a much better idea of your customers’ responses to those scenarios than surveys ever could.
There’s also the fact that focus groups usually have a moderator, someone who represents the company and will be actively involved in the group.
They’ll ask the questions, set the stage, and keep things on track. You can think of them as being akin to a courtroom judge, only not as likely to bang on a gavel.
Why are focus groups useful?
So, focus groups can give you in-depth information. But how can they be used? What information can they help you find?
Well, as mentioned before, the key to focus groups is discussion.
Focus groups are all about diving into the minds of your customers, about understanding what they want, what they need, and what drives them.
Unique perspectives coming together
Different people will have different perspectives depending on their situations in life. That’s true in any regard, but especially important with respect to focus groups.
You see, different perspectives combined will give you a much clearer picture of the situation you’re in than simply seeing from those angles independently.
Thank you to our friends at CCRC for showing this concept perfectly. Their VIEWPOINTS podcast exemplifies this concept, bringing different perspectives togetherto fully explore topics.
Combined perspectives exemplify the saying “more than the sum of their parts.”
Non-verbal information
There’s a lot of information in what people say, but even more information in how they say it.
Take, for example, sarcasm. It’s hard to detect in writing, and might even cause you to think that a person believes the opposite of what they actually do.
There’s also tone, body language, and a whole host of other indicators that can tell you a lot about how a person feels. Using cameras to capture these provides you with an easily accessible, accurate idea of what’s going on.
The more strongly you feel about something, the more it shows up in how you present your case. You can say that you dislike two individual aspects or features of a product, but if your tone is clearly stronger when speaking about one of those, it’s obvious which one you hate more.
All in all, when done right, focus groups can give you a lot more information than any text-based source of information.
Interactive questioning
When answering a survey, you’ll often put down the first thing that comes to mind when answering a question.
After all, most people’s aims when completing a survey are to get it done, not to think it over for any great length of time.
The facet that puts focus groups in a different light from other methods is the fact that you can interact and respond to the answers that are given to you. This provides more information, more depth, and a greater understanding of what the person in question is thinking.
Surveys, questionnaires, and ratings are all well and good, but nothing gets to the heart of the matter like a conversation.
Which focus group type should you pick?
It might not come as a surprise that there are multiple types of focus groups. These largely perform the same function but differ slightly in their methods.
Let’s take a look at the most common types.
Single-focus
The single-focus group is the traditional focus group, where a group of participants actively discuss topics when prompted by a moderator.
There is no split in the group, no division that sets participants apart from each other, and as such, all participants are treated as equals.
Two-way
In a two-way focus group, you have two separate groups. One discusses the topic, while the other observes the discussion. Following that, the second group conducts their own discussion.
The key to this type of focus group is that seeing the way the first group interacts with the topics can alter the way in which the second group thinks, opening them up to new ideas and perspectives without introducing a direct form of conflict.
Two-way focus groups are useful when you have a split customer base, where two or more demographics might think about your brand or product differently.
Dueling moderators
So, we get the moderators to face off with pistols at dawn, right?!
Hehe, no, that’s not the meaning of the word duel that happens here, but the general gist is the same.
In a dueling moderators focus group, you have two moderators who take specific sides in an issue that’s being investigated in order to prompt discussion of opposing viewpoints.
These types of focus groups are intended to investigate how an opposing viewpoint might affect customers’ opinions. You can think of it as playing devil’s advocate, whereby conflict is purposefully used to gain more in-depth information than you’d otherwise get.
After all, if everyone in the group agrees on a certain topic, you’re unlikely to delve further.
Wrapping Up
In the end, a focus group is about as useful as you make it.
The way you deal with the information that’s given to you by your focus group is just as, if not more important, than what you obtain from it. That’s why having a good brand strategy is crucial to modern business.
Your brand strategy should revolve around your customers – what they want, think, say, and do. Customers are the lifeblood that drives business, and without them, your brand will falter.
Great focus group questions can assist you significantly in creating a customer-centric brand strategy, using the knowledge you’ve gained to become relatable and reliable, and creating a brand identity that truly stands out.
You can find out more about brand strategy and innovation in our guide here.
Data is key to understanding what customers want and need. But sifting through mountains of data and analyzing it can prove a daunting undertaking. That’s where advanced AI tools come in. In this article, we’ll discuss natural language processing techniques (NLP) and share examples of their application, examining how they can drive your growth.
The AI revolution is coming. Today, 35% of companiesreport using AI in their business, an increase of four percent from 2021. And an additional 42% report that they are exploring ways to begin using AI.
No matter where you are in terms of readiness to begin adopting artificial intelligence and machine learning in your company, it’s to your organization’s benefit to learn about these emerging technologies and understand how you might be able to apply them in order to improve business outcomes.
Natural language processing, or NLP for short, is the perfect place to start.
It’s a powerful application of machine learning technology that can be used in a wide variety of industries for countless applications to help with everything from streamlining business processes to boosting efficiency to improving e-commerce customer experience and brand loyalty.
In this article, we’ll dive into everything you need to know about natural language processing including:
What it is.
Its advantages.
Relevant techniques.
Applications.
And, finally, real-world examples.
Let’s start from the top.
What is natural language processing?
Natural language processing is a branch of artificial intelligence that aims to help computers to understand human language input in the form of text or speech.
NLP combines multiple disciplines, including computation linguistics, machine learning, deep learning, and statistics.
These technologies work together to essentially give computer software the ability to process and understand human language in the way that another human could, including its meaning, intent, and sentiment.
NLP technology is used in a variety of applications including:
Digital assistants such as Siri.
Speech-to-text dictation software.
Voice-operated GPS systems.
Customer service chatbots.
Predictive text.
Digital voicemail.
Autocorrect.
Search autocomplete.
Email filters.
Additionally, companies are increasingly using NLP to create enterprise solutions that help businesses simplify processes, increase productivity, and streamline operations.
The benefits of employing natural language processing
It’s standard these days for companies to collect, store, process, and analyze large quantities of numerical data in order to generate valuable insights that can improve results.
Natural language processing opens up and empowers businesses to make smarter decisions that are based on larger sets of data. Further, this collection and analysis process happens quickly, especially compared to traditional methods.
For this reason, natural language processing has a number of relevant advantages.
When working with so much data, you’ll be able to generate insights to improve customer experience with the launch of new products.
On top of that, using NLP helps businesses become more efficient by automating work processes that require reviewing or analyzing texts. This frees up employees to work on other needle-moving tasks.
Taken together, you’re bound to see improved productivity, reduced costs, and an uplift in revenue.
The top techniques used in NLP
NLP is a rich field requiring the use of a number of different techniques in order to successfully process and understand human language. Below, we review and define a selection of the techniques commonly used in NLP technology.
Tokenization
Also called word segmentation, tokenization is one of the simplest and most important techniques involved in NLP.
It’s a crucial preprocessing step in which a long string of text is broken down into smaller units called tokens. Tokens include words, characters, and subwords. They are the building blocks of natural language processing, and most NLP models process raw text on the token level.
An example from Medium of how a simple phrase can be broken down into tokens.
Stemming & lemmatization
After tokenization, the next preprocessing step is either stemming or lemmatization. These techniques generate the root word from the different existing variations of a word.
For example, the root word “stick” can be written in many different variations, like:
Stick
Stuck
Sticker
Sticking
Sticks
Unstick
Stemming and lemmatization are two different ways to try to identify a root word. Stemming works by removing the end of a word. This NLP technique may or may not work depending on the word. For example, it would work on “sticks,” but not “unstick” or “stuck.”
Lemmatization is a more sophisticated technique that uses morphological analysis to find the base form of a word, also called a lemma.
The difference between how stemming and lemmatization work is illustrated in this image from itnext, using different forms of the word “change.”
Morphological segmentation
Morphological segmentation is the process of splitting words into the morphemes that make them up. A morpheme is the smallest unit of language that carries meaning. Some words such as “table” and “lamp” only contain one morpheme.
But other words can contain multiple morphemes. For example, the word “sunrise” contains two morphemes: sun and rise. Like stemming and lemmatization, morphological segmentation can help preprocess input text.
John Hopkins shows morphological segmentation by breaking the word “unachievability” into its morphemes.
Stop words removal
Stop words removal is another preprocessing step of NLP that removes filler words to allow the AI to focus on words that hold meaning. This includes conjunctions such as “and” and “because,” as well as prepositions such as “under” and “in.”
By removing these unhelpful words, NLP systems are left with less data to process, allowing them to work more efficiently. It isn’t a necessary step of every NLP use case, but it can help with things such as text classification.
Examples from geeksforgeeks of what short phrases look like with the stop words removed.
Text classification
Text classification is an umbrella term for any technique used to organize large quantities of raw text data. Sentiment analysis, topic modeling, and keyword extraction are all different types of text classification. And we’ll talk about them shortly.
Text classification essentially takes unstructured text data and structures it, preparing it for further analysis. It can be used on nearly every text type and help with a number of different organization and categorization applications.
In this way, text classification is an essential part of natural language processing, used to help with everything from detecting spam to monitoring brand sentiment.
Some possible applications of text classification include:
Grouping product reviews into categories based on sentiment.
Flagging customer emails as more or less urgent.
Organizing content by topic.
Sentiment analysis
Sentiment analysis, also known as emotion AI or opinion mining, is the process of analyzing text to determine whether it is generally positive, negative, or neutral.
As one of the most important NLP techniques for text classification, sentiment analysis is commonly used for applications such as analyzing user-generated content. It can be used on a variety of text types, including reviews, comments, tweets, and articles.
The Revuze platform employs sentiment analysis to understand how customers feel about various aspects of products. This allows companies to gain insights about consumers’ needs in real-time, and act accordingly to improve overall CX.
In this example from the Revuze platform, you can see how customers rate different aspects of the product.
Topic modeling
Topic modeling is a technique that scans documents to find themes and patterns within them, clustering related expressions and word groupings as a way to tag the set.
It’s an unsupervised machine learning process, meaning that it doesn’t require the documents it is processing to have previously been categorized by humans.
A sample NLP workflow from Frontiersin demonstrates how Input text is proprocessed before undergoing topic modeling, which breaks it into several topics.
Keyword extraction
Keyword extraction is a technique that skims a document, ignoring the filler words and honing in on the important keywords. It is used to automatically extract the most frequently used and essential words and phrases from a document, helping to summarize it and identify what it’s about.
This is highly useful for any situation in which you want to identify a topic of interest in a textual dataset, such as whether there is a problem that comes up again and again in customer emails.
Text summarization
This NLP technique summarizes a text in a coherent way, and it’s great for extracting useful information from a source. While a human would have to read an entire document in order to write an accurate summary of it, which takes quite a bit of time, automatic text summarization can do it much more quickly.
There are two types of text summarization:
Extraction-based – This technique pulls key phrases and words from the document to make a summary without changing the original text.
Abstraction-based – This technique creates new phrases and sentences based on the original document, essentially paraphrasing it.
Parsing is the process of figuring out the grammatical structure of a sentence, determining which words belong together as phrases and which are the subject or object of a verb. This NLP technique offers additional context about a text in order to help with processing and analyzing it accurately.
This is how parsing might work on a short sentence.
Named entity recognition
Named entity recognition (NER) is a type of information extraction that locates and tags “named entities” with predefined keywords such as names, locations, dates, events, and more.
In addition to tagging a document with keywords, NER also keeps track of how many times a named entity is mentioned in a given dataset. NER is similar to keyword extraction, but the extracted keywords are put into predefined categories.
NER can be used to identify how often a certain term or topic is mentioned in a given data set. For example, it might be used to identify that a certain issue, tagged as a word like “slow” or “expensive,” comes up again and again in customer reviews.
A sample by Shaip of how named entity recognition works.
TF-IDF
TD-IDF, which stands for term frequency-inverse document frequency, is a statistical technique that determines the relevance of a word to one document in a collection of documents. It works by looking at two metrics: the number of times a word appears in a given document and the number of times the same word appears in a set of documents.
If a word is common in every document, it won’t receive a high score, even if it appears many times. But if a word frequently repeats in one document while rarely appearing in the rest of the documents in a set, it will rank high, suggesting it is highly relevant to that one document in particular.
Natural language processing applications
NLP is a quickly developing technology with many different applications for organizations of every kind. Some of the different ways a business can benefit from NLP include:
Machine translation – Using NLP, computers can translate large amounts of text from a target to a source language, which can be used for customer support, data mining, and even publishing multilingual content.
Information retrieval – NLP can be used to quickly access and retrieve information based on a user’s query from text repositories such as file servers, databases, and the internet.
Sentiment analysis – This NLP technique can be used to monitor brand and product sentiment to help with customer service and product sentiment, among other applications.
Information extracting – This process, which includes retrieving information from unstructured data and extracting it into structured, editable formats, can be used for business intelligence, including competitive intelligence.
Question answering – Question answering uses NLP to give an answer to a question asked in natural human language and can be used for chatbots and customer support.
Natural language processing examples
Here are just a few more concrete examples of ways an organization might apply NLP to its business processes.
NLP in ChatGPT
One of the most popular recent applications of NLP technology is ChatGPT, the trending AI chatbot that’s probably all over your social media feeds. ChatGPT is fueled by NLP technology, using a multi-layer transformer network to generate human-like written responses to inquiries submitted in natural human language. ChatGPT uses unsupervised learning, which means it can generate responses without being told what the correct answer is.
ChatGPT is an exciting step forward in the application of NLP technology for businesses and individuals alike, with many saying it can rival even Google. Possible uses for ChatGPT include customer service, translation, summarization, and even content writing.
NLP for customer experience analytics
Using NLP for social listening and customer review analysis can lead to tremendous insight into what customers are thinking and saying about a brand and its products. With sentiment analysis and text classification, companies can:
Understand general sentiment about the brand – Does the public feel positively or negatively about us?
Identify what customers like and dislike about a service or product.
Learn what new products customers might be interested in.
Know which products to scale and which to pull back on.
Discover insights that can be used to improve customer experience and boost customer satisfaction.
For example, let’s say spicy chocolate brand Shock-O just released a new Popping Jalapeno Chocolate and wants to get a sense of whether or not customers like it. Shock-O can use an NLP-powered tool to analyze customer sentiment and learn what people are saying about the Popping Jalapeno Chocolate, whether they speak about it positively or negatively, and what themes come up again and again in reviews of this product.
All of this information can then be used to determine whether to continue producing Popping Jalapeno Chocolate, whether to increase or decrease its production of it, whether to make it spicier or less spicy, etc.
NLP for customer service
90% of customers believe that it is essential or very important to receive an immediate response when they have a question. Yet human customer service representatives are limited in availability and bandwidth.
This is just one reason why NLP-powered chatbots are growing in popularity. By being able to properly understand and analyze customer inquiries, chatbots can offer the necessary answers to questions, helping to improve customer satisfaction while cutting down on agents’ workload.
NLP can also be used to process and analyze customer service surveys and tickets in order to better understand what issues customers are having, what they’re happy with, what they’re unhappy with and more. All of this serves as crucial data for boosting customer happiness, which will, in turn, increase customer retention and improve word-of-mouth.
NLP for recruitment
HR professionals spend countless hours reviewing resumes in order to identify suitable candidates. NLP can make this process much more efficient by taking over the screening process and analyzing resumes for certain keywords.
For example, you might set up an NLP system to flag any resume that uses the word “Python” or “leadership” for a human to review later on.
This can increase the likelihood of finding strong candidates, helping an organization fill open positions more quickly and with better talent. What’s more, it can also free up HR professionals’ time to focus on tasks that require more strategic thinking.
Conclusion
The idea that data has important insights to offer companies has been widely accepted, leading businesses to invest in various business intelligence technologies in order to improve their processes and offerings.
But if your organization is only mining numerical data, you’re missing out on a wealth of valuable information to be found in unstructured human language-based data.
Natural language processing is a powerful technology allowing text and words to be analyzed as efficiently as numbers can. By learning about and investing in NLP, you’ll be able to achieve a number of desirable outcomes, including streamlining processes, improving brand reputation and loyalty, and ultimately boosting revenue.
The next step would be taking these actionable insights and using them to further drive CX with e-commerce personalization.
It’s no secret that nowadays, customers expect and demand a more personal touch from companies they do business with. That’s why e-commerce personalization is essential for the success and growth of your business. Whether you’re looking to get started with personalization or to improve its effectiveness, this guide is for you.
In the age of the “For You Page” and “Based on your previous interaction” messages, a one-size-fits-all approach to e-commerce simply won’t do. Because the modern consumer doesn’t just want personalization – they demand it.
According to McKinsey, 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, and 76% get frustrated when they don’t get them. That’s why companies that can deliver personalization generate 40% more revenue than those that can’t.
The bottom line?
In today’s commercial landscape, personalization is a must for e-commerce companies that want to capture market share and grow their revenue.
Those who don’t offer personalization will fall behind.
But those who do will reap the rewards.
This article will offer a complete guide for companies who want to get familiar with personalization and for those that seek to improve it.
We’ll share insights on what it is, why you need it, and how to do it, along with inventive e-commerce personalization examples.
Let’s dive in.
What is e-commerce personalization?
E-commerce personalization is the practice of using real-time zero and first-party customer data to display dynamic content specific to the customer.
A range of user data can be the basis of e-commerce personalization, including their:
Demographics.
Browsing history.
Past purchases.
What device they’re on.
And more.
In this personalized example, Mother Earth Products uses subscribers’ date of birth to offer discounts on their special day
E-commerce personalization can be delivered across multiple channels, including on a website, in an app, and through emails and text messages. Further, it can be presented to any lead, no matter where they are in the sales funnel.
The truth is that personalized e-commerce is already pretty dominant, and you’ve most likely seen it all over the place, like in:
Personalized site layouts.
Personalized product recommendations.
Personalized messages.
Redirects to a geographical site with geo-located offers.
Cart abandonment emails.
Reminders to re-order a product.
Personalized offers.
When done well, a personalized e-commerce experience can feel like magic.
Each customer is given a VIP treatment customized to their needs, leading them on a journey from brand awareness to product discovery to repeat purchasing.
Seven benefits of personalization in e-commerce
E-commerce personalization offers many crucial benefits to both customers and businesses. It’s an incredibly effective tool that it has become an absolute must-have for any company.
Let’s review what it can do for you and your shoppers.
Sales and conversions
First and foremost, e-commerce personalization can help you generate more sales than ever.
A whopping 88% of online shoppers are more likely to continue shopping on an e-commerce website that offers a personalized experience.
This means that personalization is a key tool that can be used to convert visitors into paying customers, with everything from personalized recommendations to special discounts helping to increase conversion rates.
Indeed, it’s reported that conversion rates increase considerably with the number of personalized page views, with conversion rates doubling from 1.7% to 3.4% when a visitor views three pages of personalized content as opposed to two.
By using data to get a clearer picture of your customers’ needs and pain points, you can better cater to individual customers, meeting their preferences throughout the entire customer journey.
Creating an experience in which customers only see what’s relevant to them, don’t have to re-input their payment information each time they make a purchase, and are notified about relevant promotions they’d want to know about – just to name a few things – all contribute to a more seamless, enhanced customer experience.
Songkick uses personalization to notify subscribers about relevant events based on preferences and location.
Insights about customers
All of the data and important insights about your customers that you collect for the purpose of e-commerce personalization are valuable far beyond your personalization strategy.
Remember, customers will be happy to share their data with you if treated with care. Use these data-collection efforts and leverage them into insights that will serve customers – all the way from improving your products to personalized marketing tactics.
Customer service
That’s not to mention the fact that all of the data you capture can also be used for customer service to resolve issues more quickly and offer better solutions to any problems that might arise.
For instance, you may choose to offer special offers and rewards to VIP customers with a particularly high customer lifetime value, or you can use a customer’s location data to give them more accurate shipping time estimates.
The latter can help avoid the issue that 42% of online customers face, where a product takes longer to be delivered than what was promised at the time of purchase.
Brand loyalty
By giving your customers the kind of tailored experience they want and showing them that you know who they are and what they need, you’re able to capture their loyalty.
If you can provide a more personalized, seamless customer experience, you can expect your customers to stick with you and continue choosing you over the competition, boosting brand equity.
Customer retention
That improved customer experience and increased loyalty that personalization can help you achieve? It also does wonders for customer retention.
And holding onto your customers is incredibly important as it costs between six to seven times more to get a new customer as opposed to keeping the customers you already have.
Competitive advantage & market share
As we mentioned above, customers don’t just expect personalization anymore; they demand it.
By successfully implementing e-commerce personalization, you’ll be able to deliver the experience your customers are looking for, allowing you to keep up with the modern digital landscape.
To put it frankly, e-commerce personalization is essential to maintaining relevance and market share in today’s climate.
Brands that don’t deliver will be left behind and passed over in favor of competitors that do.
How to implement e-commerce personalization
Okay, we’ve made our point. E-commerce personalization is the new frontier, an undeniable necessity. The next step is implementing it, and to do so successfully, you’ll need to follow these steps.
Set your goals
As a starting point, begin by defining what you want to achieve with your e-commerce personalization efforts.
Not only will this help guide you when you’re making choices about which tools and strategies to use, but it will also help you assess the success of your efforts later on.
Some potential goals include:
Boosting conversions by 0.5%, with the average e-commerce conversion rate being 3.65%
Achieving an 80% customer satisfaction rating, with the average customer satisfaction rate in the retail sector being 77% in 2021
Increasing customer retention by 5%, with the average repeat customer rate for e-commerce being 28.2%
Map the customer journey
Next, you’ll need to decide which parts of the user experience you want to personalize.
In order to do so, you’ll need to understand what your users’ journeys look like. From first learning about your brand to making a purchase and leaving a review, what interactions do your customers have?
Make a map of all of the channels and touchpoints.
Here is an example of a customer journey map template (well, a table) from Venngage that you can use to get started.
With that in hand, you’ll be able to decide where to implement elements of personalization throughout the customer journey.
Ask yourself: which moments would benefit from a more contextual experience?
For example, perhaps you have a high bounce rate from your front page. This might motivate you to try to add more personalization to the homepage of your website to create a customized experience right from the beginning.
Further, maybe you see that customers are generally unhappy with the payment experience leading to a high cart abandonment rate.
This can indicate that you may need to add an element or personalization to the payment stage of the customer journey. Alternatively, maybe other actions are needed, like reducing form friction or adding trust badges.
Decide what to personalize
Now, you should be ready to decide which personalization methods you want to start with. As we mentioned above, there are a large variety of options for you here. Some popular personalized elements include:
Product recommendations – Use a user’s purchase history, location, and demographic information to deliver them recommendations for products they’re likely to be interested in. These can be delivered through email or on various pages on your website.
While proceeding to checkout, Uniqlo offers shoppers various products they might like based on their current purchase.
Targeted offers – From first-time purchase discounts to deals on items abandoned in a cart, targeted offers are a highly effective way to get customers to make a purchase. This example from Golden Village displays a Women’s Day promotion exclusively for female users, making this important day even more special.
Continuous shopping for return customers – Help a customer pick up right where they left off by displaying items they were previously looking at. In this Shopify example, you can see how continuous shopping would appear through its platform.
Dynamic pricing – 21% of e-commerce businesses use this strategy to adjust prices based on a buyer profile, demographic information, purchase history, and browsing history.
Personalized retargeting – Create a more specific retargeting campaign by reminding users of the exact products they were looking at. This Madewell Facebook ad presents shoppers with previously seen products.
Collect data
E-commerce personalization is built on your ability to capture key information about your website visitors. You’ll need to track data points such as:
Pages viewed.
Time on site.
Items favorited.
Items added to cart.
The last page viewed before leaving the website.
Email open rate.
Email click-through rate.
Past purchases.
Average order value.
The time interval between purchases.
Customer lifetime value.
Prior email or social media interactions.
Bounce rates.
Customer retention rates.
Abandoned cart rates.
Customer acquisition costs.
Sales conversion rate.
Net promoter score.
Time on site.
Transaction path length.
For each personalization method you’ve chosen to implement, think about the data you’ll have to capture and how you might be able to access that data. This can be via a CRM, website analytics, data captured during purchases, etc.
A note on privacy
While on the topic of data collection, it’s important to broach the topic of the ethics that come with it.
Although 65% of consumers are willing to share their data to enable a personalized experience, some have gotten increasingly savvy about and even wary of having companies collect, store, and use their data.
For customers that want to keep data for themselves, there’s a solution. They can simply opt out.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) require websites to get users’ consent to have their data tracked.
That’s what that “cookies” pop-up that you see on any new website you visit is all about. Asking for permission to gather data.
Not only is complying with these data privacy laws required, but it also helps you build trust with your customers. Those who opt into personalization know that they are willingly volunteering their personal data so you can give them an optimized experience.
Five e-commerce personalization tools that will drive your growth
Successful e-commerce personalization requires the use of a variety of tools to help with data collection and analysis, as well as personalization campaign implementation.
Most major e-commerce platforms like Shopify actually offer a relatively robust suite of personalization options for you to play around with.
But there are other options out there for e-commerce personalization software. In fact, there are so many that it can be tough to know what tool to start with.
When on the lookout for such a tool, keep an eye out for ones that have:
Customer segmentation.
Multi-channel support.
A/B testing.
A modern AI engine.
Compatibility with the e-commerce platform and any other tools you are using.
A strong customer success team to help you make the most out of the product.
Ultimately, like with any other tool, trying out a few demos is a good place to start to help you choose the software that best fits your business and its needs.
To help you get started, here are a few popular tools you should know about.
Insider
Insider is an easy-to-use e-commerce personalization platform that connects customer data across multiple channels, uses AI to predict future customer behavior, and creates personalized experiences. Insider can be used across multiple channels, including web, app, email, SMS, and more.
Bloomreach
Bloomreach offers a “Commerce Experience Cloud” with a number of tools powered by a customer data engine, including a content platform, AI-driven search and merchandising, a customer data platform, and marketing automation solutions.
Clerk.io
Clerk.io uses an e-commerce-specific AI technology called ClerkCore to help businesses personalize product recommendations, implement a behavior-based search engine, and integrate email marketing. It also integrates with all of the most popular e-commerce platforms.
Yieldify
Yieldify is another popular end-to-end personalization platform helping businesses deliver personalized experiences to customers no matter where they are in the funnel. They offer a variety of tools, including lead capture forms, social proof campaigns, personalized upsell experiences, and more.
OptiMonk
OptiMonk is a personalization tool with advanced targeting features leveraging pop-ups to do everything from personalized product recommendations and special offers to stop cart abandonment while boosting upselling and cross-selling.
Revuze
Revuze is not a traditional e-commerce personalization platform, and we don’t claim to be one. That said, the insights you get from the Revuze dashboard will help you better understand what your customers want and need. This, in turn, will help with the development of future personalized products that align with customers’ expectations.
E-commerce personalization examples
To help you understand what e-commerce personalization can look like in practice, let’s review a few examples of companies successfully using it to create a superior customer experience.
Special offers
By tracking data and identifying which customers are visiting your website for the first time, you’re able to offer a special discount to first-time visitors, like recipe box company Gousto is doing for first-time visitors.
You can also create special offers on the basis of other useful information. For example, the sporting brand JD targets students with a unique promotion.
Personalized product recommendations
Perhaps one of the most popular and effective applications of e-commerce personalization is to deliver personalized product recommendations.
For example, you might offer personalized product recommendations on the basis of demographic information such as age or gender. Or you can personalize on the basis of customers’ prior interactions, showing them products similar to those they have looked at or put in their cart in the past.
Here, Zappos displays personalized shoe recommendations based on items the customer was previously looking at or searching for. By showing other shoes in similar styles, Zappos increases the likelihood of finding a shoe the customer fancies, increasing conversions.
In this email, Uber Eats sends a personalized product recommendation based on food orders the user has made in the past. Can’t blame them for loving their curries.
Suggesting complementary products
Knowing what products your users search and purchase can help you upsell and cross-sell by displaying other products that are similar or could help them “complete the look.”
A shoulder bag will definitely go nicely with these jeans. Job well done by Farfetch.
Amazon is the master of upselling, as can be seen in the following example. The e-commerce giant shows other items that a person might want to buy along with the iPhone case they are looking at, namely two different types of screen protectors.
Geo-targeted offers and product recommendations
A user’s location is a powerful piece of data that can enable you to provide personalized offers and recommendations that are especially relevant to them. For example, you can show users items that are currently trendy in the state or country they live in.
Or maybe you use somebody’s location to make sure that you are displaying the correct items for the correct season.
While you may be featuring coats and scarves on your front page in December, this wouldn’t be relevant to people in the southern hemisphere. Using geographical data, you can personalize your website, so shoppers can browse summer hats and bathing suits instead.
In the following example, Lesportsac displays more graphic, bolder designs for customers located in Hong Kong, where data analysis revealed that those types of styles are more popular.
Continuous shopping
Similarly to how you’d leave a bookmark in a book to help you know where to pick up from when you continue reading, you can make a sale even more seamless by showing shoppers the items they were looking at before.
Here, Amazon once again provides a great e-commerce personalization example, this time for continuous shopping recommendations.
Electric brushes are all the rage for this hygiene-savvy customer.
Cart abandonment emails
Win back users who you may have otherwise lost by sending emails to people who put an item in a cart and then exited your website. Remind them of the item they’re almost missing out on and/or offer a special discount to make the deal even sweeter.
Here, Crocus informs the user that the planter they were looking at before is still available and saved in their cart for purchase. This way, all the customer has to do to complete the purchase is to click the “go to checkout” button.
In this email, TodayTix reaches out to the customer, reminding them to grab the tickets for Mary Poppins they left in their cart, making it easy to complete their purchase.
E-commerce personalization trends
While it may be more popular now than ever, e-commerce personalization has proven to be more than just a temporary fad. It’s a new standard for e-commerce companies, helping to deliver an improved customer experience while boosting sales.
Within the practice, however, there are plenty of trends that can come and go as companies discover new and interesting applications of the data they are collecting. Below, we outline some of the most popular trends in e-commerce personalization today.
Headless personalization
The term “headless personalization” refers to the practice of personalizing content without using a traditional web CMS. Instead, companies can work with a headless API to separate their front-end and back-end systems so that the customer data collected in the back end can be used to personalize the user experience on the front end.
Essentially, headless personalization allows you to customize each individual user’s content without having to change the design of the entire website. This flexibility is highly useful, if not necessary, for creating the kind of personalized experience today’s customers expect.
Omnichannel e-commerce personalization
The average person spends almost seven hours a day looking at a screen, including phones, tablets, computers, and more.
Between websites, apps, all of the social media platforms, emails, texts, and chatbots, customers have no shortage of channels through which to shop and interact with a business. What’s more, 90% of customers expect their interactions across all of these channels to be consistent.
This is why personalizing only one channel, like your web store, isn’t sufficient.
An omnichannel approach to e-commerce personalization aims to create a personalized experience across all channels including online, in-store, mobile, and more.
This is the only way to deliver the personalized experience your customers expect.
Privacy-first and anonymous personalization
With the GDPR making it illegal to use users’ information without their permission, privacy has emerged as a major concern for customers, with a whopping 96% of users choosing to opt-out of allowing apps to track their data in iOS 14.5. This has led to the rise of two important trends in e-commerce personalization.
Privacy-first personalization focuses on collecting only the data that is absolutely necessary to provide an improved, personalized customer experience. It aims to protect customers’ security and win their trust through a genuine interest in respecting each user’s privacy.
Anonymous personalization is the practice of personalizing the e-commerce experience without requiring a user to create an account or log in first. This is especially useful for first-time visitors as well as visitors who opt out of having their cookies tracked, allowing you to create a personalized experience with less data.
Dynamic pricing
While price personalization is still not one of the most common applications of e-commerce personalization, it is rising in popularity as 17% of companies who were not already using it reported plans to implement dynamic pricing in 2021.
The practice of personalizing prices on the basis of purchase history, browsing behavior, and other data points has the potential for a major boost to revenue.
But while no customers will balk at receiving a special discount, dynamic pricing does carry the risk of angering customers who feel like they are being charged more than others.
Businesses who decide to try it out should tread carefully, but price personalization certainly has a lot of potentials.
Wrapping up
When it comes to e-commerce, personalization is the way forward. It proves to have a number of major benefits for businesses, among them, increasing sales and maintaining market share and relevancy as digital transformation quickly ushers us into a personalized future.
Successfully implementing personalization into your e-commerce business requires a lot of research, trial-and-error, strategy, and analyses.
This means the next natural step after implementing eCommerce personalization is to understand how to put all this data into action. And this is what our product performance analysis guide is here to do.
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