“The secret to our growth has always been, and continues to be, intrinsically related to how well we are listening to our customers. It’s important to analyze your consumer feedback efficiently, understand what matters to them most and use this data to inform marketing, product, and customer experience initiatives,” Sandra Negrea, Adore Me’s Customer Engagement Analyst explains.
Reviews are a constant stream of marketing intel that, when understood correctly, can make a huge positive impact on the success of a business. However, as fast-growing brands scale, it can be difficult to keep up with the sheer amount of feedback generated on a daily basis.
As Adore Me grew, earning spots on IAB’s 250 Most Important Direct Brands to Watch and Crain’s Fast 50, so did the amount of customer feedback they received. Manually plowing through their customer reviews was becoming rapidly unscalable.
“It was not unusual to manually read through as many as 5,000 reviews each month to extract customer insights — data mining, running different analyses, and sending reports to the relevant internal stakeholders,” Negrea says.
Mastering customer experience at scale
To manage the growing number of reviews, Adore Me became one of the early adopters of Yotpo’s newest product, Insights, which was designed as an answer to the industry-wide need to understand customer feedback at scale.
Using machine learning and sentiment analysis, Insights helps brands discover what their customers are really saying about their products and brand. With it, Adore Me was not only able to gain an at-a-glance view of the topics that mattered most to their customers, but they were also able to pinpoint critical feedback topics that may have been left undiscovered by reading reviews manually. For example, they were able to quickly identify a faulty clasp in one of their product lines and rectify the issue immediately.
It wasn’t just the merchandising team at Adore Me that found great insights into customer sentiment using the tool. Using Insights, Adore Me’s marketing team found that the word “couples” was a frequent topic broached by customers. As a result of this, their product team decided to produce an entirely new line focused on this vertical which turned out to be a major success.
How to make better business decisions company-wide
Insights can be used by teams across the company to improve the digital customer experience. Automatically scanning through thousands of reviews, identifying key topics, and honing in on the collective opinion of customers, this tool creates a comprehensive feedback loop of customer sentiment that can be readily applied to different departments.
Insights offers a comprehensive view of your key review topics, broken down by sentiment scores and correlating icons that give you a quick visual understanding of what you need to know – are your customers happy or not?
Scroll across topics that span your entire brand offering, including products, shipping, fit, and style, and see at-a-glance where you are performing well and what needs improvement.
Gone are the days of guerrilla Excel tricks, crazy sorting mechanisms, and downright tedious hours of reading through every review for every product.
Making sense of customer sentiment
In creating innovative new approaches to make businesses more effective in delivering a better digital customer experience, the magic is in the machine learning. One of the challenges of the Yotpo Data Science team was to create a tool that applied opinion mining to thousands of reviews, and allocating a score to each sentiment.
Turning words and their meanings into actionable data is the type of crazy tech-saucery that has the marketing skeptics of the world on their guard.
With a meticulous program that tested the new technology out on over 30 million reviews, Yotpo’s Insights has already achieved an accuracy score of 92% — a feat not yet achieved by any other company in the industry.
The right tool at the right time
Every customer takes a leap of faith when they purchase a product they never tried on, spend money on items they have never physically seen or touched, and trust a faceless stranger with their concerns when it comes to the product they are about to buy.
Businesses today need to be able to inspire trust, respond quickly to issues, immerse themselves in the language of their customers, and create a community around their brand. More importantly, they need to be able to do this no matter how big they get.
Insights gives you a comprehensive view of customer sentiment about every aspect of your business. And we’re just getting started. Our team is constantly dreaming up new ways to help you serve your shoppers better, create better products, and enhance your digital customer experience.
