“We have 5 weeks before we come up with product ideas that can get us new customers and increase our customer experience”. This was a challenging time as the team did not have a lot of time and so decided to take the help of the customer data. The team dug into the data where customers expressed their intention to have products that had better features and came across reasons that made the customers unhappy about certain features of their products. And this was the beginning of creating a better product and thus a better customer experience.
"To better understand the customer experience, brands should stop asking questions to their customers. They should also stop asking customers to perform feedback-related tasks, like filling long and annoying surveys. Instead, they should start listening to what consumers are saying on social media and online reviews using dedicated AI tools for user-generated content (UGC)," says Alon Ghelber, Ex-CMO at Revuze, in Clootrack's 102 CX Expert report.
Customer reviews are your go-to answer for interpreting a candid response about any aspect of your business. If your brand is not leaning on customer reviews for executing intra-organizational activities, in one or the other way, you are missing an opportunity to improve customer experience.
Customer Reviews Are Part of Everlasting VoC
“I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you're constantly thinking about what you've done and how you could be doing it better," says Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, in an interview with Mashable.
Creating a CX enhancement feedback loop with customer reviews is easy. Customers continuously articulate their thoughts and feelings about every segment of your services and products they utilize through reviews. Whether it's newly rolled-out offerings or the old ones, customers tell you the results of your efforts and where you need to focus in the near future.
For example, through customer reviews, you find that most of your customers point out an issue in a particular product's feature on Instagram. Your brand works on the same and fixes it. You will notice users leaving their feedback again on the social media platform to inform you about what they perceive. So accordingly, you stay and operate in an improvement loop.
Frequently leveraging customer reviews keeps your business procedures aligned with the objectives that result in uninterrupted success. Further, as we know, a successful the Voice of the Customer (VoC) program brings exponential business growth. And behind a thriving VoC program, customer reviews play a major role by consistently feeding customer data required to carry out CX operations.
15 Reasons To Use Customer Reviews To Improve Customer Experience
Customer experience decides the brand reputation in the market, and here are the motives to use customer reviews that directly or indirectly affect CX and improves it maintain good reputation:-
1) Product Development
Look for the areas that the majority of your customers name continually to provide in customer reviews. Pick the opportunity, and you can start a new product line to scale up.
2) Better Customer Service
Determine the spot of customer disappointment in your service through reviews. Make available all possible help promptly and make sure to rework the same flawed zone so that customers do not have to face discomfort.
3) Targeted Marketing Strategies
Customer reviews primarily draw attention to what customers desire. The marketing team can custom-tailor the strategies that drive potential customers to the next stage of the sales funnel and convert them into regular customers.
4) Upgrade The Website
From UI/UX to smooth and quick website operations, overall website functioning affects the customer experience. And you can upgrade every aspect of your website by analyzing customer suggestions and complaints via customer reviews.
5) Optimize Communication Channel
Customers speak better through reviews regarding problems they face while communicating through different channels. Your brand can work on customer reviews to hone communication by training employees to communicate more reasonably, embracing automation, and optimizing communication channels.
6) Improve Customer Acquisition
Every other customer looks at customer reviews carefully before starting the interaction with your brand. Positive customer reviews help you to hold a better customer acquisition rate.
7) Boost Employee Engagement
Positive customer reviews boost employee morale and willingness to work and serve better to the customers. Increased employee engagement in CX endeavors delivers a superior customer experience.
8) Strengthen Organization System
Viewing and operating an organization from the customer's viewpoint strengthens its core system. Enforcing customer reviews in the business system promotes a customer-first mindset that further enriches customer experiences.
9) Smoothen Customer Journey
Your brand can easily identify the roadblocks customers encounter during the customer journey. Also, your teams can work on removing those obstacles in customer-suggested ways in reviews and create an unbeatable end-to-end customer experience.
10) Identify Areas For Improvements
Most of the time, companies are incapable of identifying the exact area that troubles the organizational outcomes. Customers, via their reviews, help you notice particular areas that need improvements. It may be the improper functioning of a feature or a mistake in updating a brand element.
11) Increase Sales
Positive customer reviews account for a drastic increase in sales as people trust online reviews more than ever to make purchasing decisions.
12) Add Credibility and Social Proof
Customer reviews add to the brand's credibility, representing its authenticity in the industry. Reviews play the part of social proof that your brand serves the best solutions and experiences to the consumers.
13) Measure Customer Satisfaction
Customer reviews assist you in generating a Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score that enables you to specify the regions that satisfy and dissatisfy your customers.
14) Improve Customer Retention
With paramount alternatives in the market, customers often check for the best option possible even after making a few purchases from a brand. In this situation, customer reviews invariably back the customers' decisions. Positive reviews act as a helping hand to retain customers and increase brand loyalty.
15) Better Decision Making
Eventually, customer reviews help you derive emphatic conclusions based on what your customers want. Furthermore, customer reviews keep you on track by stimulating you to follow customer-centric approaches, bringing desired organizational outputs.
Whether it's a difficult challenge or a new opportunity, customer reviews are like the best ever advice you can follow to shine and become a well-recognized brand in a particular industry. You must follow a meticulously tailored strategy to operate with customer reviews to meet customer requirements in a shorter period of time.
Related:- 6-Step Plan to Convert Customer Feedback into Profitable Actions.
Over and above, here's a little bonus for you!
How To Use Customer Reviews For Better CX
Research shows that minute changes in the star ratings can drive drastic growth for products, anywhere between 30 to 200 percent depending on the category. No one wants to miss the factor propelling changes in customer ratings and growth for your product. By engaging with the customer ratings, you ensure the employment of reviews.
You can follow the below given four-step process to use customer reviews for a better customer experience.
1) Collect Customer Reviews
Customers are vocal on several online platforms and considerably on the channels through which you deliver your products and services. For example, if you sell your product on Amazon and your website, you can collect customer reviews using reliable software to analyze them. In addition, social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and similar can become the review data source.
2) Analyze Reviews With AI-Enabled Tech Platforms
Modern technology allows brands to take informed steps to bring profits. And today majority of companies rely on intelligent customer experience analytics platforms for making impactful CX decisions. Platforms like Clootrack have powerful AI-driven engines that analyze billions of customer reviews in real time, helping leaders to understand why their customer experience initiative is ineffective. With analyzed customer reviews, determining the customer pain points becomes effortless as customer insights reports pinpoint the elements influencing customer behavior.
3) Pick The Relevant Insights
The customer insight report assists top executives in taking targeted actions to fulfill customer expectations. You can choose an area of improvement by combining all the insights, such as market research, competitor analysis, and performance reports. Moreover, you can specify the exact reason behind the problems faced by your brand. Customer insights also save employees time by providing quick results on what to concentrate on and what to avoid.
4) Implement Insights Instantly To Boost CX
A brand can immediately start working on decided areas to enhance or fix. Why immediately? Because there is no need to cross-check the relevancy. The reports are all backed by customer recommendations, aiding in the execution of credibility-boosting processes. When a brand implements the report outcomes accurately and gets the most out of customer insights, it is more likely that the brand will stand out in its respective market space.
Engage With Customer Reviews For Better CX
We have already discussed how crucial customer reviews are for delivering a best-in-class customer experience. Since 95% of shoppers read online reviews before making a purchase, it has become immensely critical for brands to create a positive brand image. You have a better chance to take your undertakings to the next level by engaging with customer reviews.
Holding a fair knowledge of how to engage with customer reviews comes with loads of benefits, such as escalating customer engagement, building trust to uplift customer loyalty, serving more value to both the brand and the customers, and many more.
Here are a few ways in which you can reasonably engage with customer reviews:-
- Build an online community to encourage customers to interact with your brand and gain in-depth knowledge about the company's offerings. Make the interactions interesting enough that they become a loyal customer and refer your product to others.
- Do not go neutral with negative customer reviews. Respond to them in a manner that comforts the customers and, if possible, assures them to bring a solution to that issue. Let them feel heard to enrich your brand authenticity.
- Reviews from verified buyers are valuable as one can witness growth in sales. Provoke the verified users to leave a review by making the review leaving process easy through automated text or email, and, at the same time, keep in mind never to force them.
- A customer can speak on several facets of your brand. Provide incentives to the customers who leave reviews to motivate them to continue giving the reviews. You can provide discounts, gift cards, coupons, store credits, free products, and many such incentives to your customers.
To Wrap Up
Nowadays, customers are digitally aware and leave reviews online to help others know about their customer experiences, support them in making the right decisions, or let brands know their perceptions. Irrespective of the reason, it is a great chance for a brand to make use of customer reviews to enhance customer experience.
Customer reviews are a way to interpret the customer's wants and needs. Brands can utilize customer reviews to improve products or services, customer service, KPIs, customer journeys, organization systems, and many more that augment brand integrity. Operating with customer reviews polishes the CX attempts and caters as the most promising way to obtain a successful customer experience program.
Have you ever leveraged customer reviews to improve your customer experience? If your answer is No, then Request a Demo!