Although I have been working with global brands for many years, helping them better understand what their customers are saying by analyzing their online reputation, I recall struggling to define what an insight, specifically a customer insight, truly is.
One of the first things I often hear from a client coming to FeedCheck is: “We want to discover insights!”. If I dig further and ask about what an insight is, I usually receive a rather vague response. That’s why I thought of starting this article with a definition and then exploring how we can find these insights.
What is a Customer Insight?
The simplest and clearest definition I arrived at after numerous discussions with product brands is something I don’t know about my product. This implies that I first need to find out what the customer knows about the product and its customers before I can define what is or isn’t an insight for a brand.
How Can We Discover Insights Using Online Reputation?
When we talk about online reputation, we most often think of social media and customer reviews. The significant advantage of seeking insights in online reviews is that they already exist and are very specific. Each review talks about the experience with a particular product or service. We just need to bring them together, and we can start the discovery of insights.
Often, large brands have rich portfolios of products, so the first step is to categorize them. Categories can be based on the brand, use case, or target customers. After doing this, there are a few places we look for each category.
Consumer Insights in User habits
Sometimes, certain products are not used as expected all the time. A classic example is the detergent area. It has been observed that people have the habit of smelling clothes after washing them, so brands have used this insight and added fragrance to detergents.
To discover these types of insights easily, it’s best to read both our customers’ reviews and reviews of competitor products. FeedCheck helps brands collect such data from numerous sources. Once reviews are consolidated, they become a real treasure. Of course, you need the necessary tools to uncover valuable insights. We provide a rich set of tools and even an API for data searches.
Consumer insights in Product Features
Other types of insights are related to product features. We can discover whether certain product features have a significant impact on the user experience or not. In this case, we can improve instructions or take this into account in the design of the next product version. Like in the previous case, we can learn these things from both our reviews and reviews of competitor products.
FeedCheck detects and measures both sentiment and volume for each product feature.
Consumer insights in Customer Types
We can observe that the majority of a product or service’s customers belong to a specific type (e.g., 42-year-old women, people from the state of Colorado). Going further down this path, we can find out what common needs these people have and whether they are satisfied with the product. This kind of information can help us improve the product and optimize advertisements.
We can obtain such information using data from online store sales or by conducting customer surveys.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the easiest way to obtain consumer insights is to look at our online reputation, which represents the voice of our customers. If we are a new brand with no reviews you can still do this using competitors’ reviews.
FeedCheck is a product review management platform that helps consumer brands collect and analyze consumer reviews to obtain product insights.
Consumer insights may be used to improve your marketing strategies, and your products and make the best decisions for your company.