Over the last couple of decades, the ways and types of data businesses could collect on their customers grew and grew. And they could use this wealth of information to uncover consumer insights to base their business decisions on.
Things are changing, though, and companies need to take a long, hard look at the consumer information they collect and how they use it.
What’s changing? Data is becoming increasingly harder to gather - especially depending on what you want to do with it.
The rules around data protection are getting stricter and leading to the demise of third-party cookies. People are getting more savvy about leaving a digital footprint and have become less comfortable with the idea of being tracked and targeted – particularly by businesses they don’t really know. Not only that, governments, and large tech companies, like Apple and Google, are now becoming increasingly focused on the needs of the individual and protecting them.
So where and how do you uncover meaningful insights that you can confidently use to improve your business?
The types of data available to companies now
Before we move on to what companies should be looking to do moving forwards, let’s take a brief look at the various forms of data available to businesses now.
Zero-party
This is the type of information a person is willing to give a company openly. Examples of this include details people give when entering a competition, filling out a survey, or completing a Feefo review.
First-party
The data a business gets when a customer deals with them. Things like the types of products you buy, how often you buy them, what sorts of products you can be persuaded to try with special offers.
Second-party
First-party data from another company you’re legitimately allowed to use. This can include, for example, your address details a delivery company would need from a retailer to ship something to you.
Third-party
Information gathered from other sources, public and non-public, that’s not been openly given by the individual it’s about. Consider the electoral roll, no matter what political party you support, and they can all access your details and contact you whether you like it or not.
Which of these is the best to build your business insights on, though?
We agree with Fatemeh Khatibloo, VP principal analyst at Forrester Research, when he said about zero-party data, ‘When a customer trusts a brand enough to provide this really meaningful data, it means that the brand doesn’t have to go off and infer what the customer wants or what their intentions are.’*
And gathering zero-party data can be done easily in a number of ways, including reviews, surveys, quizzes, and polls.
As verified reviews experts and the biggest in the world, we’re probably a little biased. But we think reviews from genuine customers that have bought from you are the best way to get zero-party data.
Why?
Because you can be sure the feedback you get from these customers isn’t fake, unlike that you can get from open review platforms - where anyone can say what they want, whether they’ve shopped with you or not. And that means you can confidently use the information you get through us to build insights you can use to boost your business. Our AI technology also helps you spot trends and improve your service by addressing any recurring problem areas.
So, what sorts of business changes can you make with the insights verified reviews can give you? Here are just a few examples:
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Uncover how to improve your customer experience
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Fix or improve a product
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Understand trends and general sentiment
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Identify new opportunities - such as a new product or service
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See where you’re better than your competitors
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The list goes on… and you can see some examples below
The power of reviews in action
How do you turn customer reviews into business-building insights? Here are some examples of small, medium, and enterprise businesses that made valuable changes using their customer insight:
Case 1: Coffee loyalty cards
With increasing competition from larger chains, the owners of a small independent coffee shop were looking for ways to keep hold of their customers. By using Feefo, they were able to implement customer reviews and ask their customers questions about their products and service. When looking through the most used terms and phrases in the data, they noticed a reoccurring theme. Customers loved the coffee and the ethics behind the brand but were used to using loyalty schemes at bigger coffee chains. The coffee shop introduced a loyalty card scheme – a simple change that quickly gave them back their edge and saw the number of repeat customers quickly increase.
Case 2: Strengthening any weak links
A car dealership with ten sites nationwide noticed some disparity in the sales figures across the different sites. They didn’t just want to know why some were performing better than others, but they also wanted to bring all the figures in line with the highest-performing locations. The business started collecting customer reviews and quickly realised that certain dealerships were suffering due to poor customer service. The company sent surveys to their staff, and the results showed that the staff in the worst-performing dealerships felt they could benefit from more training. Customer Service training was rolled out in all the weaker locations, and sales gradually began to rise.
Case 3: Reviews highlighted the real issue
A holiday company found they were getting poor reviews for the trailers at one of their properties. At first, they assumed the trailers themselves needed refurbishing and allocated a substantial budget to refresh them. But when they analysed their Feefo review data more fully, they found that the poor reviews were from trailers in one particular location of the park - a more shaded location that didn’t receive any direct sunshine.
So, they moved the trailers to a different area with more natural light. Review sentiment subsequently improved – saving them thousands of pounds on a refurbishment that wouldn’t have addressed the underlying issue.
Case 4: Delayed delivery leading to increased returns
A well-known online gift retailer noticed it was experiencing a sudden peak in returns, so it started collecting customer reviews to find out why. After analysing the insight, the company noticed that the majority of the negative reviews were about gifts arriving too late, often missing the occasion, and then ending up being useless. The business had recently swapped courier companies, so it took swift action to return to its previous delivery provider. A few weeks after, the returns had plummeted, and posts from unhappy customers on social media quickly got lost amongst the positive ones.
Reviews, insights, and their impact on business - facts and figures
What can you actually achieve with all this valuable, zero-party review insight directly from your paying customers? Take a look at these statistics and consider what a difference verified customer reviews would make to your company:
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Increase sales - when customers leave positive reviews, studies have shown online sales can be boosted by up to 18%. Reviews are also one of the biggest influences on customers’ buying decisions, with up to 85% of consumers trusting online reviews as much as they do personal recommendations. Displaying reviews of individual products has also been shown to increase sales by up to 200% better than those without.
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Improve customer experience - 89% of consumers pay as much attention to the reply to a review as they do to the review itself. So, when you proactively respond to reviews, especially if things haven’t gone perfectly for a customer, it shows others you’re committed to great customer service.
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Build trust in a brand - lots of things can affect brand trust, and one of the biggest is customer reviews. Using a platform like Feefo that collects genuine reviews from real customers establishes your business as a brand that people can trust. And believe it or not, having both positive and negative reviews on your website increase trust. In fact, the likelihood of someone buying peaks at ratings in the 4.0 to 4.7 range, then starts to decrease as ratings approach 5.0**. Consumers obviously feel a brand that gets just glowing feedback is too good to be true.
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Boost traffic and online conversions - our reviews can help improve your performance in search results and generate Google stars to make you stand out from the competition. Adding our reviews to your adverts can triple click-through rates. Simply displaying reviews can increase conversions by 270%.
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Increase customer loyalty - by adding the simply deceptive Net Promotor Score® (NPS) question, ‘How likely are you to recommend the company to a friend or colleague?’ to your review invitation. Analysing your NPS results can then help you: measure customer loyalty, make business decisions, and fix problems your customers may have had so they move up your NPS scale from Distractors or Passives to Promoters who will buy from you again and again and will tell people that they should use you too. According to research from Temkin***, when it comes to loyalty, Promoters are over four times more likely to buy again from a company and over five times more inclined to use a company still if it gets things wrong – now that’s loyalty.
To sum things up
Even though it’s getting harder to collect data, there is a solution. Feefo. The customer insights we can deliver through verified reviews will become the most valuable thing you can own as a business. Having them means you can:
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Find out how both potential and existing customers perceive your brand
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Take a deeper look into your customers’ buying decisions
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Build long-term relationships with your customers
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Make meaningful changes in your business, which your customers will love
Find out more - talk to us
To discover how verified customer reviews can deliver the data and the insights you can build your business on, book a demo with one of our experts.
