Customer negative reviews from online stores have nothing to do with the rules of writing and giving constructive feedback when what one gets is not quite what one expected.
They’ve been written and shared by people who had put their trust into a brand’s promise, an ad or a friend’s recommendation. A few days later from the purchase moment, they got disappointed when they first unpacked their product and started using it for the job they had purchased it for or, when over time, the product proved to have lived a too short life for what it was meant.
Negative reviews are crisply focused on product failures and very rarely mention what was good though. They are a severe direct warning to an audience interested in that particular product and brand.
The negative reviews of a product may raise awareness about issues that could potentially be met across an entire category, including other brands too. Low review rankings can on the fly impact the perception of someone whose eyes have accidentally fallen on them while scrolling through online search results.
With their harsh and cruel tone of voice, negative reviews are here to live long after their first public appearance. If you can’t change them overnight, you may at least try to diminish their weight in the eyes of potential customers by following these 4 strategic steps:
Step 1: Listen to what they say
As the Greek saying goes “One swallow does not make a summer nor one fine day” reading negative reviews now and then, in a sporadic manner, does not help. But consistency and intention of seeking ways to act on findings do. In order to gather sufficient and relevant evidence about how and why your product creates unpleasant experiences and how it gets customers frustrated, one needs to consistently monitor negative reviews on an on-going basis.
And here, enabling tools like FeedCheck, dedicated to product reviews monitoring help tremendously by acting as brands’ best virtual assistant for this matter. Multiple brands, products and marketplaces – FeedCheck supports them all. Engage it and your negative reviews from everywhere and any product will be delivered right into your email inbox or other preferred collaboration tools so that you and your teams never miss a thing from your unhappy customer warnings.
Step 2: Measure what they say
After gathering all feedback in one place, you need to give it structure. Nothing works best as reading your reviews if you truly seek to identify the actual flavor of various review writing styles and uncover different use cases your customers adopt your product for.
However, FeedCheck has its own solution for this job too, by helping you automate the tracking of the most usual topics mentioned by your customers and build a product sentiment chart. Thus, you can rapidly get data about how many people talk about your product’s core topics and how the negative sentiment unfolds over time – for your products, your brand,
your category and particular marketplaces and online stores.
Step 3: Understand what they say
With the right data in front of you and knowing all your product historical changes you can correlate events and conclude what is worth and necessary to correct at them. Here you can explore whether R&D is going to play a role in that, your suppliers or manufacturers need to revisit their spare parts offering, your designers need to remake certain elements of the whole, your marketing needs to adjust their messages accordingly or your sales people need to advise and direct customers from everywhere towards better alternatives in your product portfolio.
FeedCheck helps you here get a wider view span for a broader understanding – not only of how your customers view your own products but also those of your competing brands.
Step 4: Act on what they say
An accurate understanding of how your products are being perceived by customers over time helps you make your decisions and act in order to either correct perceptions if they’re misinformed and based on the wrong purchases made by your customers or act on product’s specific life cycles from the design desk to the online shelf.
While these 4 steps should be part of any brand’s long-term strategy and an approach to working on solid future promises to their customers in need of products that they design and sell, immediate actions are also important to adopt, such as replying promptly to your negative reviews. FeedCheck alerts you every time a negative review about your product has been written so that you can join the public conversation fast and offer solutions or advise to your customer’s problem or anyone interested and looking at your product page.
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