Digital Customer Experience Summit with Revuze's Adi Toppol & Max Willard

Host
Next up, we’ve got a great session by Revuze. Max Willard, Customer Insight Strategy Lead, industry expert building customer trust in CX. Very important topic. Come on up.

Max Willard
Thank you.

Adi Toppol
And friend.

Host
And friend. Sorry, sorry. Both names weren’t on there.

Max Willard
It’s all good. No worries. All right. Um, hello everyone. I’m very excited to be here and present today. My name’s Adi. I look after sales and marketing at Revuze. I’m actually relatively new to the company, but I’ve been in the space of customer experience, voice of the customer for quite some time, and I have with me Max here today.

Adi Toppol
Hi, everyone. Really, really excited to present to you today and take you through the presentation. It’s gonna be about the power of reviews and how you can use them to be customer-led.

Perfect. All right. So just to kick it off a little bit, question to the audience: Does anybody have a guess or a sense of what percentage of people will read reviews before buying any product? Retail space mainly?

Audience
(95%)

Adi Toppol
Wasn’t expecting that. 95%. Any other guesses? All right, so pretty close. Next slide: 92%. You’re right up there. Typically, we get lower numbers, but it is 92%, and that’s a relatively conservative approach. Go ahead.

Max Willard
And speed really matters in this world of consumers. And it boils down to really two main dynamics. The first dynamic is how fast markets are changing.
We used to live in a world of mainly physical shelves. You wanted to put your products on the shelves. This took time. If you needed to take them off the shelves, this also took time. It was a physical process.
If you wanted to know who your competitors were, you went to, for example, your local Target and looked at the shelf, looked at the aisle. That’s where your competitors are.

Well, now we live in a predominantly digital shelf world. Things are flying on and off the shelf. People can put products on the shelves very quickly. Anyone can do this. They take them off; it’s very fast. It’s hard to keep up with. And in some cases, you might not even know who your competitors are.

So this is the first dynamic of why speed matters in the consumer world. And the second is how fast consumers are changing their minds.
Something we used to see a lot of is: “I am a second-generation user of this product. My parents use this detergent, so I use this detergent. My grandfather used this razor; my father used this razor, so I use this razor.”

We don’t see as much of this anymore. People are a little bit less loyal, and in fact, 54% of consumers will change the brand they’re using after just one bad experience.

Now, that’s pretty harsh if you really think about it. Just one bad experience, and they’re gonna change the brand, and they know that they can because the market is keeping up with them. So those are really the two main dynamics. That’s what it boils down to.

Adi Toppol
And you might be wondering, can you even trust online reviews? So I’m gonna let Adi speak to us a little bit about that.

Right. So, as we look at online reviews, there are really three main categories. Your organic reviews, which are typically posted on the brand.com website or on a retailer website. These can be verified and non-verified buyers that post these reviews. A second category is incentivized reviews. Typically, with some incentive, like a discount, a free product, or any sort of other incentive that is provided to the consumer in order to post a review.

These will have some tendency to be less authentic in some cases—effective but with less authenticity.

The last bucket that we have here is what we call syndicated reviews, which can be any type of review. This can be an organic verified buyer, organic non-verified buyer, or incentivized review.
What really happens here is that the syndication platforms will take any one piece of content—in this case, a review—and will post it across multiple sites. And there are hundreds of sites where reviews are being read by consumers. So while potentially the review itself can be authentic, the power or the impact of that review is force-multiplied by the fact that it’s posted across so many websites.

Max Willard
Yeah, and there’s really two key challenges that come up when you’re dealing with these different types of reviews that Adi just mentioned. The first is around data manipulation. Websites aim to increase conversions. They want to boost the numbers and the amount of reviews that are on the website. And this is great, but you need to know how to deduplicate these reviews, right?

If there’s many reviews, hundreds more reviews on a specific channel that are syndicated, to understand what’s going on really at a granular level on that channel, you need to know how to deduplicate these reviews.

And the second challenge is around cutting through the different types of reviews. You need to know how to remove the incentivized reviews.
I’m sure people here have experienced this before, where a brand you really love says, “We’ll give you 25% off if you write us a review. We’ll give you something in exchange for writing us a review.”

Well, you’re gonna be in a pretty good mindset when you write that review because you’ve just received something. So you’re gonna write a pretty good review. That’s going to increase the sentiment of these incentivized reviews. And we see that the sentiment is always higher on incentivized reviews.

To understand what’s happening specifically for a certain category or product, you need to remove the incentivized reviews to understand what the actual sentiment is and how customers really feel about your products.

It’s very similar when it comes to the syndicated reviews. You need to know how to filter these out for specific research purposes.Now I want to talk a little bit about one of our customers, Dorel Juvenile. By a show of hands here, who is a parent?

Max Willard
Nice. I’m not a parent yet, but I can imagine that when it comes to your children, your newborn babies, you’re going to read reviews pretty carefully. It’s all about safety. It’s all about quality. When you’re talking about juvenile products—cribs, strollers, high chairs, car seats—it’s all about safety.

Dorel Juvenile, being a leader in this space, had a really good sense that they had some social listening tools and some traditional research methods to understand consumers and get feedback about their products—what’s being said about safety and quality features. But they knew there was a gap.

They felt like they lacked SKU-level data and retail channel-specific data. So with all that being said, despite everything they had with consumer feedback, they still lacked this.

After using Revuze, they were able to become this cross-functional organization where insights were flowing to the product team and the marketing team. The product team was able to use consumer feedback on specific SKUs—on their product and their competitors’ products—to understand where they needed to make adjustments.

For example, maybe it was the wheels on a stroller that needed to be thicker so it could move better on grass or other terrains. This is direct innovation coming from the voice of the consumer.

For marketing, they were able to get much more in tune with the way their consumers were talking about their products so they could take their messaging and align it with what consumers were saying.

It’s been a really big success so far for Dorel, and they’re really enjoying the cross-functionality of the dashboard they get for their juvenile products.

Max Willard
That’s a great example, and it touches on why it’s so important to have the consumer lead, rather than you leading the consumer. When you’re talking about reviews, in many ways, it’s one of the only objective views of your consumer.

You’re not asking questions and getting answers. In this case, the witness—the consumer—is leading you. And that’s one of the best things about reviews: you can expect anything.

For example, how many topics of discussion do you think there are around toilet paper? You can just shout them out—it’s fine.

Audience
(Smiles and murmurs guesses)

Max Willard
It’s 46. There are 46 topics of discussion on toilet paper. If I gave you 30 minutes, you might come up with 15, maybe 20: flushability, texture, and so on. But how would you know there are 46? It’s all coming from your consumers.

Another example: What do you think is the most important part of a smart TV to consumers?

Audience
Ease of use. Screen quality.

Max Willard
All great guesses—things I might’ve guessed as well. But it’s the remote control. The remote control is the number one thing, the most important thing, to consumers when it comes to smart TVs—not audio, not visuals, not ease of use.

How else would you have known that? Your consumers are telling you that. So you have to listen to them.

Adi Toppol
Let’s talk a little bit about categories. Max was just talking about toilet paper and TVs. The way we analyze reviews is at the category level.

For example, if we look at the category of smart TVs, the way we operate is by having insights into this category across all brands that are marketing and selling products within it, where there are online verified reviews.

What that means is we already have a collection of most products in the category. If we don’t have the category, we stand it up. But the real nugget here is that once you implement a category and have a dashboard in our tool for that category, you’ll see insights you’ve likely not thought of before.

You’ll see some things you’re aware of—topics you’re familiar with—but with different results. And you’ll also see what’s being said about your competitors’ products in the same category.

For example, as a consumer insights manager, a product marketeer, or a product owner, you’re able to see not only what your customers are saying about your product from verified sources but also what they’re saying about other products.

Inherent in our dashboarding system is the ability to do a competitive analysis. It could be something as simple as a SWOT analysis, where you can pick, let’s say, in a category with 10 brands, however many brands you like, and layer them on a SWOT analysis.

Our big data, AI-driven approach does all the number crunching and analysis needed to display that in a SWOT analysis or any other type of dashboard.

So, to Max’s point, you’re gaining insight about your product—things you might not have thought were important. And you’re also getting information about your competitors.

Max Willard
To add to what Adi said, it’s category insights. This is the next generation of review analytics. Today, you could go online—Amazon, Walmart, Target, whatever the website is—and look at products and reviews.

You could even use some tools to create summaries or do comparisons. But this has limitations. How can you analyze a product you don’t know exists?

And if you wanted to take it a level up, how would you analyze all shampoos, all running shoes, or all smart TVs in a category? With thousands of products sold across hundreds of retailers worldwide, you can’t possibly go one by one.

Category insights allow us to collect and analyze data at scale, answering research questions that couldn’t be asked in the past. For example, you can create a category benchmark: What is everyone saying about a category, and how does your product compare?

If you wanted to understand the best noise-canceling headphones, you might get different answers from focus groups or surveys. A general consumer might list the top five brands, but a professional musician might mention a brand you’ve never heard of. Who do you believe?

Category insights let you mix perspectives and get the whole view. Then you can make your decisions based on what everyone is saying in the category.

Adi Toppol
Maybe just one thing to summarize that point, because it’s so important for what we do. It’s basically the ability to get authentic insights about your product from verified buyers at scale, versus trying to solicit feedback through paid surveys, incentivized reviews, and other mechanisms.

Those mechanisms cost more, you get less input in terms of sheer data volume, and you’re unlikely to be able to use them to get information at scale about your competitors. With category-level insights, you get a lot of authentic data, analyze it across the entire category, and unlock opportunities you couldn’t access otherwise.

We have one example from one of our customers. They launched a tennis shoe, but they didn’t necessarily designate it as a women’s pickleball or tennis shoe. They were trying to do two different things—two different products.

Using the insights from our Explorer dashboard, they realized they had a better market fit than they initially thought for this particular product. These examples resonate across all our customers, where they’re able to find out what’s working, what’s not, where opportunities lie, and how they compare to their competitors in the market.

Max Willard
Let’s finish with one more question for the audience. What percentage of people do you think won’t purchase a product after reading a negative review?

Audience
(Raises guesses)

Adi Toppol
88%. That’s right—88% of people won’t buy after seeing negative reviews. And we can share the source of this research. This is highly relevant for retail, but it also applies to other industries.

Max Willard
Now, just a few words about Revuze and what we do. We collect and analyze reviews from any brand.com or retailer.com website. We ingest them and deliver a dashboard with category-level insights about your brand, your products, and your competitors’ brands and products.

For example, if you’re Nike and want to look at the footwear category, you’d tell us the category and the websites you want us to scrape reviews from. We do the rest. We ingest the data, and now you have not only all the reviews about your own products but also reviews on your competitors’ products.

This unlocks so many capabilities, and in many ways, it’s just as important to know what your competition is doing.

Adi Toppol
One more thing to add here. When you look at the dashboard, you see metrics like the total number of reviews and opinions extracted. For example, a dashboard might show 31,000 reviews with 84,000 opinions.

This means every review contains, on average, more than one topic of discussion. Using AI, we extract all the opinions or topics discussed within each review, provide a sentiment score, and calculate a star rating average—either at the category level or down to the SKU level.

With this scale of data and the dashboarding capabilities, you can analyze trends over time. Is customer sentiment dropping? Is it increasing? What new topics are gaining importance?

Max Willard
To give a sense of scale, we operate across more than 350 sources today—platforms like Amazon, Target, Walgreens, and others. Many of our customers already find what they need within our existing catalog of sources, but we can also implement new sources if they’re available.

We currently operate natively in 12 languages, have extracted over 15 billion insights to date, and cover more than 15 million individual SKUs in our category catalog. For some brands, we cover tens of thousands of SKUs across dozens of categories.

As mentioned earlier, we handle the heavy lifting of scraping and filtering reviews. If you want incentivized or syndicated reviews included, we can do that. But for authentic insights, most of our customers opt for verified organic reviews.

Adi Toppol
Some of the brands we work with include some of the biggest names in retail. While we can’t disclose all logos, you’ll see well-known brands here. For some of them, we cover tens of thousands of SKUs across dozens of categories, like Procter & Gamble, which has a wide portfolio of products.

Max Willard
We have about five minutes left on the clock, so let’s open it up for any questions.

Audience Member 1
So I heard a lot about businesses benefiting from reliable reviews, but you also spoke about consumers being able to see verified, reliable reviews. I looked up your website and didn’t see anything for consumers. Is that missing?

Adi Toppol
Great question. What you’re really asking is whether there’s a B2C model for Revuze. The answer is that Revuze does not currently do that. We are a B2B enterprise software company, so we sell to businesses.

However, having recently joined the company and playing around with the tool, my wife and I were joking that we don’t know how we’ll ever shop again without looking at this dashboard. It’s a powerful B2B or B2B2C offering, but we don’t currently offer it as a consumer-facing product. Definitely food for thought.

Audience Member 2
You mentioned that 54% of consumers won’t return to a brand after a bad experience. With social influence and reviews being so important, how do businesses balance between creating amazing post-sale customer experiences and leveraging social influence?

Adi Toppol
Another great question. These two worlds—social influence and reviews—live side by side. Buyers who purchase tools like Revuze are often closely connected in the org chart to those buying social listening platforms.

Social listening is more real-time and focused on influencing customer decisions immediately, while reviews offer more authentic, relevant, and insightful data for long-term business decisions. Social media is great for reacting to posts—positive or negative—whereas reviews give you a deeper understanding of consumer sentiment and product performance.

Both are complementary, and over time, I believe these two products will become even more synergized and appeal to the same buyers.

Max Willard
Just think about yourself as a consumer. If you’re online shopping and see a bunch of bad reviews, does that hold more weight than an influencer’s opinion? For most people, bad reviews are going to impact their decision more. Both are important, but reviews carry a unique weight.

Adi Toppol
We have time for one last question.

Audience Member3
You mentioned younger generations aren’t engaging with surveys to provide feedback. Based on your experience, which types of customers engage the most with reviews?

Max Willard
Great question. Most of the time, we’re working with CPG companies that have physical goods you can buy and review—categories like skincare products, blenders, mattresses, and more.

The review ecosystem is vast. Everyone here is part of it, whether you’re reading reviews, leaving them, or discussing them. It’s an integral part of how we shop and decide today.

Audience Member 3
(Asks follow-up question)

Adi Toppol
We can discuss this further later, as we’re about out of time.

Host
Thank you, everyone. Let’s give Revuze a big round of applause for such a great session.

Max Willard and Adi Toppol
Thank you!