7 Ways reviews can provide actionable consumer insights and better ROI for your business

Monitoring changes in your star rating can help you stay on top of how your customers are feeling and make sure you’re giving them the best experience possible.

But when it comes to making sure your customers are happy, is your job ever really finished? Even the smallest changes to how you operate and communicate with your customers can translate into pretty large boosts in customer satisfaction, resulting in more loyal customers and better ROI for you.

Your customer reviews contain powerful consumer insights, and tapping into them can shed light on changes you can make to ensure a better experience for all of your customers going forward.

Some of them – like shipping issues – might seem obvious, but there are also some surprising ways we’ve seen businesses tap into the goldmine of insights within their reviews to improve their operations — and their ROI.

Many larger brands pour money into consulting on their pricing strategies and struggle to find the perfect balance between making a profit and keeping customers coming back. If you’re a smaller brand, this might not even be an option for you. Whichever you are, the insights in your reviews can really help you here.

If you search your reviews for terms like pricing and overpriced and you’re seeing a lot of negative reviews then it’s definitely worth looking into. Lowering prices on some of your products might feel like it will mean less revenue for your company, but if enough of your customers are taking the time to complain about your pricing they probably won’t be shopping with you again.

This negative feedback online could also be deterring new customers from shopping with you. We can’t tell you what’s right for your business, but lower prices could mean more return customers as well as more new customers.

This one might seem a little obvious, but filtering your customer reviews to look at the ones containing terms like shipping and delivery can shed a lot of light on your current shipping practices. For some customers shipping will always need to be as quick as possible, but often the underlying issue here is a breakdown in communication.

If you have a large amount of customers writing negative reviews containing these terms, adjusting the shipping policies on your site or putting them in a more prominent location might help ensure that customers have better expectations of when they’ll receive their orders.

This will lead to a lot less annoyance on their end and fewer negative reviews for you.

Having an issue on your site – even if it’s only live for a few hours – can really impact your bottom line if customers are getting frustrated and give up on their purchase. This is especially true during busy periods like the holidays or black friday. And if there are issues, you can rest assured that frustrated customers will likely be talking about it in their reviews.

We’ve noticed that many successful businesses closely monitor their reviews during these high volume periods so that they can make adjustments in real-time and fix bugs as soon as possible. A better onsite experience means happier customers and higher sales all at once, so identifying and quickly fixing these issues is key.

Does your business rely on a lot of customer facing sales or service reps? Some review providers make it easy to add tags to your reviews to automatically track which salesperson or service rep assisted that reviewer. This can give you unbiased insight into how your different reps are doing. Once you have that insight, it’s easy to level up your workforce.

If you have employees consistently getting negative reviews, you can schedule training for them to help them improve. And by highlighting employees who consistently receive rave reviews, you can improve their morale or even gamify their performance with a leaderboard for your team, encouraging better performance from everyone.

This one is very common — and extremely important. With many brands serving multiple countries all with different sizing systems, communicating size conversions is a struggle many clothing brands face. Fortunately, with clearer communication, it can be easy to fix.

If you’re getting a lot of negative reviews that include terms like size and fit, you might want to update the language – and make sure it’s hard to miss – on your site to note that certain products run smaller or larger.

Including sizing guides can be really helpful as well. Clearer communication around sizing shows customers what to expect, and can improve your customer satisfaction while minimizing returns.

Many businesses use third-party vendors for submitting support tickets on their site and this can mean that a big portion of your customer experience is somewhat out of your hands. Outsourcing support is largely a great thing, but having limited control over the support experience can be scary for conscientious brands.

Monitoring your customer reviews is a great way to easily spot any issues in your support ticketing process. By searching your reviews for terms like ticket and support you can identify how often these issues are occurring and figure out whether it makes sense to keep working with that specific vendor.

Customer service is often the biggest thing that customers will either love or hate about a brand. Because of this, it’s extremely important to keep an eye on how your customers feel about yours at all times.

Reviews make this incredibly easy. Not only do they help you get a general idea of how you’re doing, because customer service can elicit such an emotional reaction – whether positive or negative – reviewers often detail exactly what happened. This helps you know exactly what kinds of experiences your customers are having, and how to improve those experiences in the future.

To sum it up, there are a lot of valuable insights hiding in your customer reviews. But for some businesses, monitoring all of these things at once can feel overwhelming.

Our Review Insights tool can help by doing most of the heavy lifting for you. Instead of digging around for patterns and trends in your reviews, it will automatically uncover problems and areas of improvement for you. It’s constantly working in the background to help you improve your business for your customers and it delivers your insights to you in easily digestible dashboards and reports.

Ready to get started with Trustpilot? Creating an account is free — and our experts are just a call away if you’d like more information.