Customer Experience

Amazon Review Analysis: Gaining Actionable Feedback

Think of your relationship with your customers in terms of a conversation. How do you speak to your customer? How do they speak to you? How do the words both of you use impact your relationship?

You can control how you communicate with your customer. You can also use the customer's feedback to positively alter how you communicate with them. One form of customer feedback are your customers' Amazon reviews of your product.

Amazon reviews are a powerful insight into the mind of your customer. By tapping into Amazon review analysis, you can receive actionable feedback that enables you to adapt and adjust your strategy. Once you do, you'll be able to better meet their needs, adding to the positive feedback and hopefully eliminating negative feedback. You'll greatly improve the overall customer experience. And remember, reviews are not purely reactive — they’re a form of market research.

When you perform Amazon review analysis, there are a few questions you should ask yourself as you work through the data. But what are those questions? Let's take a closer look at what they are.

What are the Benefits Your Customers are Seeing?

Your positive reviews provide you with a snapshot of the major benefits you provide to your customers. From a marketing perspective, this is valuable information you can use to bolster your strategic marketing plan.

Your product will have features and benefits. You can have all the greatest features in the world, but unless the benefits to the end-users are clear, it will be harder to sell your product. Your customers want to hear about what your product can do for them to solve a problem they have or make their lives better. Features are nice, but it's benefits that convert leads into customers.

Customer reviews can go a long way in telling you that. Properly analyzing and understanding your Amazon reviews can demonstrate exactly what benefits your customers are getting out of your product's use. They may even tell you some benefits you weren't aware of. You can then take these benefits outlined in your Amazon reviews and insert them into your business's social media and marketing content, broadcasting it to potential customers.

What are the Major Problems They're Encountering?

Your customers may also come across a problem when they use your product. A less than stellar review may highlight this problem. It may seem counterintuitive, but Amazon reviews containing negative feedback can be extremely useful.

Without the negative feedback received in Amazon reviews, you may have a hard time understanding your own business's personal pain points. If you're struggling in one area, feedback can help shine a light on exactly what's going wrong. Customers highlighting their experience can tell you what you need to strengthen.

Information gleaned from customer reviews can also tell what other aspects of your business may need addressing such as customer service or engagement. The right tools can go beyond just marking the one- and two-star reviews, they can help group and categorize the large complaints that are in need of fixing and also help you catch the small complaints before they become a bigger problem. Simply put, the good news about the bad news is that by hearing it, you can begin to figure out how to solve it.

How Passionate are Your Customers?

Another valuable data point you can use from your customer reactions is the length of their reviews. This will help tell you how passionate they are about your product, no matter what kind of strong emotion your product generates.

Whether they're singing your praises or upset over a perceived deficiency, you should thank the customers who go into great detail in their reviews. This indicates a strong emotional tie to your product. If it's a positive tie, that's data you can use to build on. If it's negative, obviously it gives you the opportunity to see where major improvements are needed.

If a customer leaves a long, positive review, they've essentially become your product evangelist. They are now an advocate for what you do, and they're giving other customers scores of information that will push them closer to buying from you. A long, positive review offers significant social proof, with evidence, as to why someone should buy from you.

While no one likes to see negative reviews, a long, negative review also provides you with useful data. There may be some customers who are beyond pleasing with unreasonable expectations. There will be others, however, who found some sort of issue and have plenty to say about it. The more information they provide you, the easier it will be for you to fix the problem so others won't experience it in the future. Understanding what’s happening in these longer reviews is critical — the customer will likely touch on multiple points in these reviews, so being able to parse and understand the content of these reviews is important.

What Does the Conversation Around Your Product Sound Like?

What words are your customers using to describe your product? How does that language align with the issues you perceive your customers having? How does it align with the solution you offer? What topics are they talking about?

You can use the language from these reviews to drill down and determine what it is your customers are really after. Think of it as an extended form of market research. If there's room for you to adapt your product based on this data, you can do that by conducting Amazon review analysis and observing the conversation your customers are having in that forum.

You can also take the specific verbiage your customers are using and integrate that into your marketing materials. What your customers are saying is how you gauge the customer needs. By aligning the keywords you're targeting in your marketing plan with the words of your customers, you'll be able to develop content that better meets those needs.

How Can You Use This Data to Help You Improve?

Ultimately, the Amazon reviews your customers give you can — and should — be used to improve your product and overall business approach. While it's fairly simple to identify what you should be looking for from this data, it's not as easy to harness the data to find the information you need. That's why it may help to identify a service provider with experience examining and analyzing large swaths of data to help you determine how to engage your customers better. Select a partner that uses NLP algorithms to quickly analyze large numbers of reviews. They should know how to collect customer feedback and what to do with it once they have.

However you move forward with your Amazon review analysis, don't ignore the great data those reviews can give you. By listening to your customers and applying the information they provide to your marketing strategy, you can better serve them going forward.