With the increasing rate of disruption optimizing consumer experience is becoming more and more important to businesses worldwide. Join us, as we talk about consumer feedback analytics with Agnieszka Łuczak – Senior Consultant in Consumer Analytics and Consumer Marketing Expert at Lingaro.
We know that consumer feedback is crucial for making accurate business decisions, but why is it still so challenging to collect and make use of the opinions and reviews?
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced consumers to face a new reality and adapt to new circumstances, that has resulted in a rapid change of consumer behavior. The pandemic strongly affected the way consumers search for products, evaluate alternatives and how they purchase products. The closing of markets, smaller shops, restaurants and other services has shifted consumer behavior to increased at home consumption, at home and online purchasing and, as a result, created new purchasing patterns.
Consequently, an increased number of consumer opinions, reviews and comments could be found in multiple channels related to e-commerce – shopping platforms, delivery platforms, product comparison platforms, fan pages, forums and many more. The challenge is to gather, analyze, and combine huge amounts of consumer feedback coming from multiple sources into actionable insights. Manual data review and reports creation, usually done by organizations, is time consuming, inaccurate, and no longer effective. Nor is it efficient in supporting business decision making. Organizations usually don’t have a centralized consumer feedback analytics solution – one place where they can have all their consumer data.
What does centralized feedback analysis mean and how does it help achieve competitive advantage?
Centralized consumer feedback simply means having all consumer opinion data coming from different communication channels – for example from social media comments, internet reviews, Infoline calls, e-mails etc., in one place and in one reporting service, dashboard, on one screen. Just like we have in our solution called the Insighter.
This enables easy and clear analysis and drawing conclusions, but most importantly it enables fast identification of new trends in consumer behavior or changes in the needs and wants of consumers. For example, one of our clients found out that even though the supermarkets remained open, consumers are afraid to be exposed to many people and prefer to shop at small grocery stores. Ensuring proper stock levels and increasing portfolio presence at selected channels allowed to outperform the competition and increase sales volumes and shares.
Moreover, consumer feedback analytics can be a valuable source of information on how to improve existing products and make them more attractive and appealing. Studies show that consumers are increasingly seeking products that align with their values – these insights can also be found in direct and indirect consumer opinions.
What key elements/indicators should be considered in consumer feedback reports, so that they provide top insights and support making strategic decisions?
Consumer’s opinions and insights are valid and important resources for marketers for improving the consumer experience with a brand. By analyzing them, brand owners can find answers to the most common questions like for example:
What are the key drivers of my consumers’ loyalty? Is it price, quality, taste or brand reputation? What are the newest product features needed to drive product innovation? What are the key reasons for consumer complaints in e-commerce? Is it delivery time, limited availability, or damaged packaging?
One of the most popular indicators that can be found in consumer feedback reports is sentiment analysis, also known as opinion mining. Thanks to machine learning and natural language processing tools, it helps to determine the emotional attitude behind consumer opinions and statements – in other words, their satisfaction. Being one of the most reliable sources of tangible data that can further be used in making business decisions, the insights help not only to measure satisfaction but to better understand consumer lifestyles, actions, shopping habits and all other kinds of preferences. Taking consumer suggestions into consideration may be important while deciding where to allocate budget to get the highest return on investment, or how to smooth or improve purchasing decision processes, or to find a product feature that will become a unique selling proposition and market success factor.
The most successful and well performing companies understand the important role that consumer feedback plays in business. They know how crucial it is in managing consumer satisfaction and loyalty, in consumer retention, when improving products and services, or when introducing new products or campaigns.
What are the most common challenges that organizations face with their consumer feedback analytics?
Once the consumer feedback is gathered, organizations frequently have problems to quickly and effectively analyze the data coming from multiple sources. In many cases Excel files are used to report on a variety of consumer touchpoint data, or data used for reporting is purchased and stored on unrelated services outside of the organization.
Marketers and analysts have difficulty accessing, understanding, and building reports based on consumer insights – as they usually don’t have one, appropriate tool that enables better understanding of consumer behavior and needs.
Fortunately, this can be effectively solved with the Insighter – a tool for centralized consumer feedback. Here the data can be fetched, transformed, and integrated with information from each of the divisions’ local databases, as well as enriched with additional data from internal and external touchpoints and sources. As a result, all consumer feedback, insights, and complaint-related input can be stored in one single place and serve as an ideal foundation for the comprehensive reporting solution. Furthermore, it enables AI-driven classification of consumer comments into deep categories, types and sub-sentence sentiments e.g., quality complaint, testimonial, product parameters, the subject of complaint, service reference or even a single comment from each consumer.
With the Insighter, you can see on one screen how your brand is performing in terms of satisfaction among its competitors, what are the most frequently discussed topics, or even see the words used among those topics, check the reason and even a specific, single opinion that is behind negative comments, or see the correlation between consumer sentiment and for example the digital campaign impressions or reach, and many more. The Insighter gives a holistic view of all consumer feedback in just a few clicks.
Agnieszka Łuczak is a Senior Consultant in Consumer Analytics and consumer marketing expert with 15+ years of experience working for multinational companies in the CPG, education and tourism sectors. Her professional experience includes development and implementation of long-term marketing strategies and corresponding brand plans, as well as brand positioning and portfolio optimization, market analysis and market research including segmentation, consumer insights and behavior. She is interested in supporting marketing in AI driven solutions.
