The Key Advantages Of Mining Customer Reviews

 Technology is breaking down the entry barriers for new brands especially in terms of distribution and marketing, aided by factors such as smartphone usage and internet penetration. Subsequently, the evolution of e-commerce has resulted in extreme disruption of the retail industry over the past decade. In a short span, E-commerce went from being the disruptor channel to the only available option for many product categories, due to its increased adoption. In fact, recent research from Grand View Research estimates the current E-commerce global market to be USD 9.09 trillion and expected to grow by a CAGR of 14.7% from 2020 to 2027. 

The indisputable fact is that superior customer experience are the critical factors that helped sustain this tremendous growth. With mobile, internet, and other technological advances ensuring ease of purchase, both the e-commerce companies and the sellers have started focusing extensively on improving the customer experience to keep their business afloat and stay ahead of their competitors. And, customer reviews are invaluable in providing meaningful insights. In addition, customer reviews greatly impact purchase decisions, as 97% of the online customers read reviews before buying a product online. The following are the three richest public data sources for mining and analyzing customer reviews for business growth. Together, these sources can 

1. Identify influential factors to product satisfaction
2. Isolate customer experience pain points 
3. Track consumer response to competition.

Mining Customer Reviews

Before identifying the source to mine the customer reviews, it’s essential to narrow down which customer review channel works best for the objective of the analysis. The raw customer reviews data can be extracted from the following sources individually or as a combination of sources based on the business goals.

E-commerce sites:

Most of the e-commerce platforms, including famous ones such as Amazon, eBay & Flipkart, enable and encourage their customers to rate and post a review on the products that they have purchased. This source is the most reliable customer review data that’s mined online.

Social Media:

In recent years, many customers have started expressing their opinions about products and services on social media. It has also become a channel where brands are actively engaging with their customers, making it an emerging channel in mining customer reviews.

Review websites and Online Forums: 

Review sites, niche blogs, and online forums can be excellent sources of reviews of a particular product segment. At times, many customers prefer voicing their concerns on review sites and forums, rather than posting on social media.

The raw textual data are mined from the above sources using distributed crawling techniques and pre-processed by using Stop words Removal and Normalization techniques before using Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning, and Sentiment Analysis Algorithms to extract meaningful insights.

 

Advantages Of Customer Review Mining

The insights derived by mining customer reviews assist the business growth and in improving the customer experience with the following aspects.

Identify Influential Factors:

Customer Review insights would help in understanding the factors, features, and attributes influencing the buying decision and that the customers really care. These insights assist the business in better product placement among the target segment, thus leading to better business outcomes.

Optimize Customer Experience 

The customer reviews not only help us understand the sentiment of customers towards the product and services but also helps in understanding the underlying product issues and service gaps leading to those sentiments. Improving these shortfalls helps in sales growth and in generating additional positive reviews.

Track Competition

It’s quite usual for the customers to compare the product with its competitor in the same segment while posting reviews. Analysis of these reviews would provide the precise shortfall of the product or service respective to its close competitors. This analysis also helps in understanding the dynamics of the market segment, thus contributing to valuable insights holistically on the ecosystem for better decision making.

 

SetuServ’s Voice of Consumer Insights and Signals (VOCIS) platform is capable of tracking millions of data points from multiple sources, and analyzing the same using AI models with custom taxonomies based on the market segment. This analysis helps businesses in precisely understanding the market landscape and purchase drivers influencing customer decisions.

People’s lives across the globe have been disrupted and impacted in unprecedented ways due to the current COVID-19 pandemic situation. The spread of this pandemic has meddled with the lives, livelihoods, communities, and businesses worldwide. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has forecasted that the COVID-19 induced economic loss could go up to $8.8 Trillion, i.e., 9.7% of global GDP. The International Labour Organization (ILO) has pointed out that more than 400 million full-time jobs have been wiped out globally due to this pandemic.

Source: https://medium.com/@TheDataArtist/creating-wordcloud-from-twitter-feed-using-r-370f509275af

This pandemic has also brought in a unique set of social and economic challenges that have emphasized the actual value of identifying a business’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as recognizing and mitigating associated risks. At this critical juncture, organizations around the world have pushed themselves in innovating solutions to limit the economic disruptions and put them back in the path of recovery. In order to do that, it’s critical for the organizations to empathize with their customers at the emotional level. In this post, we shall discuss the importance and ways of understanding customer emotions during these times.

 

Importance Understanding Customer Emotions

With most of the customers restricted within their homes due to the COVID-19 lockdown, delivering experiences and services that meet their new needs with empathy and care would be the influencing factor in the survival of the business during this pandemic. The companies that are capable of delivering the same would create a long-lasting positive customer experience thus leading to better customer retention and sales. 

Currently, the key challenge for marketers is to get a pulse on the customer preferences in real-time and rapidly innovate to optimize the product and identify the customer journeys of the target segment. In order to achieve the same, along with agility and responsiveness, organizations must also ensure that their decisions are backed through data and real-time research.

 

Ways to Understand Customer Emotions

The traditional marketing channels have gone obsolete during this pandemic, and the marketers have had to rely solely on  digital channels for  insights to influence their target audience. The following are the sources that can be leveraged to efficiently understand the customer’s emotions.

 

1.     Search Queries

Google, the leading search engine that processes around 70,000 searches every second and 5.8 billion searches every day. All these searches are customers trying to find solutions for their problems. That is a lot of data that can be leveraged in driving business results. A systematic keyword research shall help in understanding the following.

• Who is your Target Audience
• What are their Areas of Interest
• What are their Needs
• What is their state of mind

 

Analyzing the search queries provides insights on the customer’s emotions and needs and adds more value to the business.

 

2.     Social Sentiment

Social media has become a prominent digital platform where customers voice  both their concerns and satisfaction about the product or service. Text mining the social media posts of the target audience and performing sentiment analysis on the same  provides valuable insights about their current emotions. These relevant insights help in identifying product/service gaps and anticipated features that can be funneled to improve the customer experience leading to better business growth.

 

Setuserv’s Customer Review Insights and Signal (CRIS) platform can help businesses in improving their marketing content reflecting customer’s emotions and needs based on the automated search query analysis, and also perform sentiment analysis that helps in a deep understanding of their customers and market ecosystem. Read more about the CRIS platform here.