The content of this briefing is adapted from Econsultancy’s Ratings and Reviews Best Practice Guide. It covers:
- The key challenges of embracing the feedback economy (and how to overcome them)
- Fear of negative feedback
- Fear of too much feedback
- Unrealistic consumer expectations
- Lack of internal resource
- Fake reviews
- The factors that have fuelled the growth of the feedback economy
- The increasing role played by AI
The key challenges of embracing the feedback economy
Investing in customer ratings and reviews, and capitalising on them as part of the marketing mix, can bring a number of significant advantages for brands.
However, there are also a number of challenges facing brands who invest in ratings and reviews, from initial set-up to everyday management, acting on insights, and the feedback economy’s wider impact on brands.
Five common challenges facing brands, and how to overcome them, are outlined below.
1. Fear of negative feedback
Many brands and companies are keen to harness reviews but worry about the impact of negative feedback. A 2019 survey from Brightpearl and Trustpilot showed that 43% of US retailers do not know how to best deal with negative reviews.
However, as Gabriele Famous, Chief Marketing and Brand Officer for Trustpilot, says: “Some of the strongest and most vocal advocates that companies can gain are those who have had a negative experience turned positive, just by the company listening and acting on their feedback.”
Businesses must listen to the customer and understand the cause of their dissatisfaction. They should respond to each negative review and offer a solution, using it as an opportunity to demonstrate the brand’s speed of response, and level of customer care.
2. Fear of too much feedback
It is hard to predict how much feedback a brand will receive when it starts to invest in generating ratings and reviews, and this unknown quantity can be daunting. “There is so much information out there so a) being aware of it and b) being part of the conversation are big challenges that businesses need to address,” says Adrian Valeriano, VP, EMEA at OpenTable.
There are now tools available that do the heavy lifting for brands, so there is no need for additional resource to read and assess every single review. Companies can now use the latest technology to collate reviews from multiple platforms in a single place, and generate instant, digestible reports that can be understood by the wider company.
3. Unrealistic consumer expectations
There is a growing consumer demand for transparency and authenticity, and the broadcast nature of social media, coupled with the immediacy of mobile, means brands are increasingly exposed.
Leigh Peacock-Goodwin, Head of Marketing and PR at Atom bank, says: “[Increased transparency] is generally very positive, but it has also led to unreasonable consumer expectations and a culture of trying to gain something from a brand as soon as something is amiss. It can be a way to unfairly demand things and that can be difficult for brands to deal with.”
Consumers will only get more demanding, and brands more exposed. It means brands must continue to engage with consumers, even those who appear to take advantage of that transparency, and trust that their honesty will pay off. Thankfully, those that exploit the system are in the minority.
4. Lack of internal resource
Monitoring and managing reviews, and leveraging insights, can be labour intensive, but being customer centric demands a proper commitment to feedback, and this means putting the necessary people and processes in place to manage reviews and act on insights.
“Explaining to your company the importance of building your brand’s trust, reputation, SEO, conversion metrics and also providing further insight on what customers are thinking about your services and products provides a strong argument should you need to persuade your company you need to take the leap,” says Famous.
Having the right technology in place can drive internal efficiencies, enabling manual data crunching tasks to be automated, and freeing up human resources for more strategic work.
5. Fake reviews
With the proliferation of review sites and the ability for consumers to post unsolicited reviews on a multitude of platforms, brands are rightly concerned about being the victim of fake reviews. In addition, some brands are guilty of posting fake reviews in order to increase the volume of feedback and elevate their Google search ranking.
A study found that on Amazon alone, at least 78,000 customer reviews across 14 popular technology products were removed between 2016 and 2019.
At Feefo, all ratings are verified – they are all given by people who are proven to have bought a product or service, or have engaged with the brand, explains the company’s Chief Executive Officer Matt West. “It is important to invest in trust with the consumer – it takes years to build it up and seconds to knock it down.”
There is no guaranteed way of avoiding fake reviews, given the proliferation of open review sites featuring unverified user content, but brands must be sure to monitor reviews, engage with third-party site owners, and alert them to any potentially fake comments. AI is also playing an increasingly important role in addressing the issue of fake reviews (see the section on AI, further down).
Brands that work with third-party partners who verify ratings can be sure that those appearing on that specific site are authentic, and can leverage these for insights and marketing purposes.
Key takeaway
Overcoming the challenges inherent in the feedback economy relies largely on embracing reviews as part of the company culture, putting the right resources and processes in place, and engaging with consumers in a way that shows the business is properly listening to and acting on feedback on an ongoing basis.
The feedback economy is growing
The twin factors that have fuelled the feedback economy – namely mobile and social media – will continue to feed its growth. The empowered consumer will not diminish. If anything, consumers will become further enlightened and informed, and more demanding.
The parallel expectation of transparency and authenticity will see successful brands evolve into more human, less corporate, organisations, with customers at their core. Businesses that have not yet responded to this shift will have to act soon.
“Consumers are becoming a lot more savvy,” says Sophie Light-Wilkinson, VP Marketing and Business Development EMEA at Bazaarvoice. “We will see many more brands embrace this and make sure the organisation is set up for it, shifting away from paid advertising and paid influencers.”
It means the feedback economy will continue to evolve. Talia Shani, Director of Marketing at Yotpo UK, says: “The brands that are winning modern consumers convey a clear brand story and values, create a community around their brands and enable customers to be advocates. An important first step towards advocacy is the humble, yet powerful, review. And yet it’s a step that so many brands have yet to adopt.”
The way that organisations interact with consumers will also evolve, and brands will have to not only become more customer centric, but more responsive. Gabriele Famous says that the information and insights companies gather will increase: “We’ll start to see companies speed up on the time it takes to react and change the things their customers are asking of them. We’ll also start to see reviews becoming even more useful to the consumer audience through the information they have at their fingertips to understand services and products.”
As businesses (and their specialist partners) become more sophisticated at generating actionable insights from reviews, and are able to more quickly implement these, the gulf separating truly customer-centric brands from those paying lip service will continue to widen.
Famous adds that she hopes to see the reviews space becoming more open and transparent too, allowing everyone to understand how companies are using reviews systems. “Those that have nothing to hide and want to engage with their customers in a genuine way will be the ones that win out,” she says.
AI will play an increasing role
AI is playing a growing role in online reviews, allowing the development of tools which enable brands to process and understand hundreds, thousands or even millions of reviews, as well as draw actionable insights from them.
With natural language processing (enabled by AI), businesses can identify patterns in the text and understand common themes, based on multiple reviews. This goes far beyond star ratings and unearths the biggest opportunity: understanding the context for, and sentiment behind, what consumers are saying.
Feefo uses natural language processing to help brands identify valuable insights from a wealth of reviews. This is done by analysing the sentiment in comments to extract key insights.
For example, Vauxhall uses Feefo’s AI technology to identify core themes that emerge from reviews, such as such as handling, drive quality or seating position, and turn it into an easily digestible graph. “It shows positive themes, negative themes, things to watch, and highlights areas of opportunity,” says Jonny Evans, Digital User Experience and Commerce Manager for Vauxhall. “That can be really useful, certainly when we put together business cases for new cars.”
AI can unearth insights
According to a Qualtrics study from August 2018, 64% of market researchers believe that AI will take over the task of ‘finding relevant insights in feedback data’ in the next 10 years.
Using AI, brands can also detect which topics are most popular among shoppers, automatically prompting customers to write about those topics in review request emails. According to Yotpo, AI-powered prompts have resulted in a 61% uplift in the prevalence of suggested topics in customer reviews. Machine learning can also adjust requests in real time, to meet changing customer needs.
Light-Wilkinson agrees that AI will play an increasingly important role in how brands engage with consumers. “Brands will be able to aggregate all sources of feedback into a single database and leverage more and more AI to structure the data, digest it and create actionable insights for the various departments of the organisation, with the end goal of building better products, services and customer experiences, and developing brand image, driving loyalty and generating more growth.”
AI can also help to tackle the challenge of fake reviews, identifying the nuances that separate reviews generated by bots from those created by humans. This can work like a spam filter, detecting and flagging up reviews which are suspected to be fraudulent.
For example, Trustpilot has bots that scan reviews for unusual patterns (such as those that indicate that they might be fake). Reviewers are notified if their review is removed and given the chance to have it reinstated if they can prove it is genuine.
Key takeaway
AI has a valuable role to play in developing tools that enable brands to quickly and efficiently manage and leverage reviews on a large scale, identifying patterns and understanding context and sentiment that will increasingly impact the wider business. To take advantage, work with a partner that is investing in this area.
Ratings and Reviews Best Practice Guide
The post The feedback economy: challenges, growth, and the role of AI appeared first on Econsultancy.
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