The Key to Understanding and Improving Your Consumer Sentiment

In a world where consumers leave feedback across multiple channels, understanding their needs has never been harder. Feedback is fragmented, the consumer journey is ever-changing, and data is siloed. Navigating this landscape to provide a personalized experience that fuels your business growth has never been harder. 

Are you confident that you have the tools in place to manage and understand your consumer feedback across all of your channels- public and private, solicited and unsolicited? 

Use the following checklist to ensure all of your locations are positioned for success when it comes to understanding consumer feedback. 

1. Ask the right questions

Getting direct feedback – especially in today’s changing market, is crucial. And, the best way to get direct feedback is to ask direct questions. Surveys have been a pillar for gathering and understanding consumer feedback for decades for a reason- it’s because they work. 

A survey is only as valuable as its content, so when you’re designing your survey, think about what you really want to know. Do you want to know about your consumers’ interactions with your front desk staff? Or are you hoping to dig into a process change your organization made a few months back? The cliche is true- if you don’t ask, you might never know.

2. Tap into your reviews

Direct questions only get you so far. If you’re only paying attention to the structured feedback of surveys, you miss out on the opportunity to understand the entire consumer journey. It’s impossible to truly understand how consumers are feeling about your brand until you uncover the feedback they are providing without being prompted.

Tapping into the power of the unstructured consumer feedback that comes from reviews allows you to gain invaluable insights into your brand’s reputation. By actively monitoring and analyzing review sentiment and trends, you can identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions to enhance the consumer experience and fuel business growth.

3. Elevate your feedback

Once you start managing your structured and unstructured feedback, it’s time to connect the two. Say a consumer provided positive feedback regarding their experience with your business via a survey. Great! However, without a solution to amplify the positive feedback from the survey on a third-party site (e.g. Google), you’re missing out on the opportunity to showcase positive feedback to potential customers. 

By elevating your private feedback to your third-party review sites, you are activating the silent majority – your happy customers. Oftentimes consumers are happy to provide positive private feedback, but often aren’t going to take time out of their day to leave a review on your key listing sites. However, research shows that 77% of people are willing to leave a customer review when asked (Forbes).  
When you connect private, first-party feedback to public third-party review sites, your consumers are seeing a holistic view of your organization and the experiences other consumers have had with your brand.

Choose the right Online Reputation Management tool to understand your consumer feedback

When you take the steps above, you set your business up to connect the dots between unstructured and structured consumer feedback, and are better able to understand consumer sentiment and improve your business outcomes.  

The best feedback management tools will not only help you manage your feedback, but they will provide real-time data analysis across all of your channels and locations. By using a reputation management solution that offers a holistic view of market trends and consumer feedback, you will have the actionable insights you need to drive operational improvement at every level of your business. Feedback management solutions like Reputation go one step further by allowing you to leverage text analytics to highlight key themes and trends in your customer reviews and surveys so that you’re able to pinpoint areas of improvement across your entire business. 

Large, multi-location organizations often struggle to find solutions that are able to provide this level of intelligence at scale. Reputation makes utilizing the public and private feedback of tens, hundreds, or even thousands of locations quick and easy. Our patented Reputation Score, which aggregates your entire online presence (reviews, listings, social media, and more) acts as a leading indicator for your public and unstructured consumer feedback.

Visit Reputation.com to learn more about how you can understand your consumer sentiment across all of your various channels.