Customer Feedback Analysis: How To Analyze Reviews?

Collecting customer feedback makes no sense without its subsequent analysis. It is at this point that you can delve deeper into the first-hand insights you receive and intelligently interpret them to make data-driven decisions.

In this informative article, we will explain why and how to analyze customer reviews. Moreover, we will provide you with ideas, techniques, and helpful automated tools for customer feedback analysis. So, keep reading to get the most from customer reviews for your business.

What Is Customer Feedback Analysis?

Customer feedback analysis is extracting valuable insights from the feedback received. Thanks to it, you can interpret first-hand data to see the actual situation and avoid guesswork and assumptions when making decisions. 

Customer review analysis is also a great way to listen to your audience, understand whether their actual opinions match your hypotheses, and make your brand more customer-centric.

Why Is Customer Feedback Analysis Important?

Customer review analysis provides the following benefits.

1. You identify the strengths and weaknesses of your business

A customer's perspective is different from that of a company employee, manager, or investor. A product may be convenient and profitable from a business standpoint but fails to meet customer needs and expectations. The only way to determine its real market potential and choose the best areas of improvement is to listen to customers' opinions.

This applies not only to product policy but to every aspect of the company's interaction with the target audience — advertising, commercial offers, transaction processes, support, and subsequent communications. Feedback can refer not only to products but also to the brand itself — its image, reputation, and tone of voice.

2. You get to know your customers better

No matter how effective your forecasting models are, you can't know everything about your customers. This is especially true when it comes to the social-psychological characteristics of your target audience. By analyzing feedback in detail, you may learn:

• how they see the ideal product to fulfill their needs,
• what features are critical to them,
• what prevents repeat purchases, and
• what they expect from your brand.

All of this allows you to customize your marketing policy more accurately, choosing communication methods and messages. Detailed customer feedback analysis will help you "find the key to their hearts," increasing conversion rates.

3. You improve your tactics and strategy

By simply reviewing feedback without going into deep analytics, you can see current problems. An experienced manager can easily sort them by importance and urgency, creating an optimal action plan. Of course, a well-tuned analysis system can automate this process, reducing errors and increasing the speed of response.

But more importantly, customer feedback analysis can reveal patterns and regularities. With this information, you can not only solve current problems but prevent future ones. Sometimes, the data obtained by the marketing service allows for optimizing other aspects of the company's development strategy, such as human resources, technology, infrastructure, and so on.

Getting Actionable Insights From Your Customer Feedback

Insight is any information from which a business learns something new. Do you find yourself coming across an old problem over and over again when you study the feedback? That's not insight. Did your analysis help you identify a new mistake that you didn't even know about? That's insight.

While any feedback is helpful for business, it is the actionable insights that will be most valuable. They allow you to draw conclusions and choose the right actions to improve your current situation. 

Are you learning for the first time that customers would like a smartphone with better performance that isn't available with today's level of technology? That's not an actionable insight. Does the analysis make you realize that a change in staffing policy could significantly improve sales and customer support? That's actionable insight.

To get actionable insight, you need to choose the right methods of information gathering. One of the simplest yet most accurate and effective ways would be online surveys. For example, you can ask the user why they left the site and what exactly was missing from your commercial offer. 

Claspeau pop-up builder can help you with this. You can choose one of our ready-made survey templates or create your survey pop-up from scratch in our intuitive drag-and-drop editor.

After you get the feedback, you need to categorize them. For this purpose, divide them into topics. For example, there could be different problems that your customers face: service quality, product quality, pricing, reliability, etc. Based on the number of feedback in each category, you may decide which issue is the most urgent and which is a secondary problem to solve. This way, you will have better time management and be able to prioritize the tasks of the whole team.

As a rule, categories are linked to separate departments of the company — sales, customer support, marketing, logistics, and so on. Another variant of categorization is by stages of the sales funnel, from advertising and the first visit to the site to transactions, problem-solving, repeat visits, and so on.

To structure a more detailed database and to have a better understanding of your client's problems, make sub-categories as well.  Subcategories, like tags in automated customer support systems, are usually formed situationally. They can refer to a specific product, a company employee, a territorial division, the reason for the request, and so on. One response can refer to several subcategories simultaneously, allowing you to better understand its essence and move faster to practical insight.

Analyzing customer feedback is quite a difficult task because you cannot always apply quantitative methods. For a long time, it mostly involved tedious manual work that took a lot of effort and time. Fortunately, there have been some advances in this area recently.

Modern machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies make it possible to process hundreds and thousands of requests within a minute. Specialized applications determine the subject of appeals, select keywords, and evaluate the tone of speech. This allows responses to be automatically categorized and tagged, for example, by urgency or importance to the company's financial results.

How To Analyze Customer Feedback: Best Tools

Some companies combine both manual and AI-driven methods for fast and accurate analysis. In fact, automated tools can help you accomplish many tasks only by uploading your data. Let's take a look at the best tools available in the field of customer feedback analysis:

1.  MonkeyLearn NPS Survey template allows you to upload the customer feedback of your company and get your customer feedback analysis within minutes.
2. Lexalytics allows you to get ready-to-go text analytics. With its help, you will not need to sit for hours and extract keywords from your customer’s feedback and reviews to highlight the main topics, services, or products they are satisfied or unhappy with.
3. NVivo or Dovetail can help you solve qualitative analysis tasks as they are another automated solution for better customer feedback analysis.
4. SurveyMonkey is a great way to automate questionnaires and the answers you receive from your customers rather than making a form manually and sending it via email.
5. Thematic is created for customer data-driven companies and businesses. It discovers the central theme of customer feedback topic, saving you lots of time reading feedback one by one.

If you are going to share all the information with your colleagues, remember that visually clear and straightforward information is digested more easily than dull texts or speeches. Fortunately, many automated or AI-driven tools make graphs and tables to give you a clearer visual result. This is a good way to present the whole process to your team members.

Listen to Your Customers to Improve Business

Analyzing customer feedback is one of the best ways to optimize your business model and enterprise strategy. It provides valuable, actionable insights in the following areas:

1. Product and pricing policies. You'll learn what challenges customers face, what their needs are, and what factors could stimulate demand.
2. Customer communications. Feedback will help you determine what percentage of customers remain dissatisfied with their experience and choose the best ways to engage with them.
3. Customer support. Knowing the main pain points, you can automate the solution of part of the problem, significantly reducing the burden on employees.
4. Marketing and advertising. Feedback will show which communication channels are most effective and what problems arise in each of them. This will help to get rid of mistakes and set up perfect appeals.
5. Staffing policy. Sometimes, the cause of problems is an employee's insufficient qualification level or even low motivation. Working with such a non-obvious conclusion will help you eliminate many pain points.
6. Brand positioning. Feedback helps you understand how exactly customers see your company. Your image may not match your idea. In this case, you should pay more attention to marketing and PR.

Customer Feedback Analysis: how Claspo can help you

Claspo is one of the best tools for Internet marketers to simplify the collection of feedback. You can easily create a survey pop-up for your website and choose different display scenarios. For example, when visitors intend to leave, are inactive for a long time, or have viewed several pages without completing the target action.

Claspo puts the feedback from your clients into a spreadsheet that can be uploaded as a CSV file. In this file, you can view the survey results and the feedback from each customer individually. Moreover, the data can be transferred to your CRM or ESP. There, you can divide all received reviews into categories and subcategories, segment customers depending on their answers, and build further personalized communications based on this.

Equally important, embedding pop-ups into a website does not require coding skills. The whole process comes down to copying the ready-made script and pasting it onto the website using our step-by-step instructions. So, with Claspo, you can start collecting feedback and get the first data for analysis easily and without delay!

Try Claspo for free right now!