Customer reviews can be a valuable source of information for measuring brand health. Customer reviews offer direct feedback from people who have used your brand’s products or services. For businesses that rely on their reputation, online word-of-mouth is important because this feedback is visible to all.
In reputation management, what others say about your brand is just as important as what you say about yourself. In this blog, we list seven ways that customer reviews can help measure brand health, along with a variety of data sources for customer reviews and feedback.
1. Customer satisfaction with your brand
Reviews often reflect the level of satisfaction customers have with your brand. Positive reviews indicate a good customer experience, while negative reviews can reveal gaps in delivering the expected service. Sentiment analysis of customer reviews can provide an indication of overall customer satisfaction with your brand.
2. Perceptions of your brand and its attributes
Customer reviews can offer insights into how customers perceive your brand. Analyzing reviews for recurring themes, keywords, or sentiments can help identify the key attributes or qualities associated with your brand. Gaining access to this data can offer significant understanding of how customers view your brand.
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3. Consistency in delivering on your customer promise
A strongly positioned brand is one that consistently delivers on the customer promise. The level of service can vary from one staff member to the next, or from one store to the next. Analyzing reviews can help identify customer touchpoints that fall short of expectations and reduce variations in the customer experience.
4. A measure of product or service quality
Reviews can help gauge the quality of your brand’s products or services. Positive reviews that consistently highlight the quality, performance, or value of your offerings can be an indicator of a healthy brand. Conversely, negative reviews that point out product or service issues can help identify areas that require attention.
5. Feedback on brand initiatives
Customer reviews reveal insights into the success of marketing campaigns, new products, or brand initiatives. Analyzing these reviews can help you understand how successful your efforts have been. Look for mentions of these initiatives in the reviews and assess the sentiment and feedback associated with them.
6. Indication of brand loyalty and advocacy
Customer reviews can reveal the level of brand loyalty and advocacy. Positive reviews that express loyalty, repeat purchases, or recommendations to others can demonstrate strong brand loyalty. Tracking metrics like the Net Promoter Score (NPS) through customer reviews can provide insights into brand advocacy. The frequency of emotional words in reviews can also be a useful measure of brand affinity.
7. Competitive analysis of your brand and its attributes
Comparing customer reviews with those of your competitors can provide a relative measure of brand health. Understanding customer perceptions of your brand can help you identify your strengths and weaknesses. Customer feedback also validates your positioning in the market. Comparing your brand to your competitors will help you identify areas where you may be falling behind.
[Check out this guide explaining what brand health is and how it can be measured.]
The process of uncovering your brand health from the customer’s point of view starts with collecting customer reviews and centralizing them on one platform. Popular sources include Yelp reviews, TripAdvisor reviews, Google reviews, and Amazon reviews; however, there are other forms of customer feedback that might reveal a fuller picture of your brand. These data sources can be found in either external or in-house feedback channels.
EXTERNAL
Channels
• User ratings, reviews, and comments on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. This includes engagement with your content such as follows or likes, as well as, feedback on opinion polls such as votes.
• Reviews of your app and its User Experience (UX) on the App Store, Google Play Store, and Chrome Web Store, along with any in-app feedback mechanisms. You might also include SiteJabber and TrustRadius for online or software offerings.
• User comments on general product review sites, such as Consumer Reports and Influenster, or more category-specific ones such as MakeupAlley (cosmetics), GoodRx (pharmaceutical drugs), and Better Business Bureau (services).
• Customer comments and feedback on community forums or discussion boards related to your brand or industry. These might include Reddit, Quora, Hive, and ProductHunt. Another useful inclusion is member comments in Facebook Groups. You can use social media listening tools to flag any mentions of your brand and product (just as you would on social media platforms).
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INTERNAL
Channels
• Customer comments through your internal communication channels are often overlooked, but can be a trove of hidden insight about your brand and customer experience. Customer feedback includes inquiries, compliments, suggestions, and complaints. These can be unified with feedback from external channels onto a single platform for qualitative data analysis.
• Customer support interactions across different channels such as emails, live chats, support tickets, phone calls, messaging apps, and Google My Business.
• Market research studies such as mystery shopping, focus groups, interviews, and customer surveys contain hidden gems in verbatim comments that are often not reported or analyzed in a way that is actionable. This happens because historically, managers find more structure in quantitative data. Review analytics of qualitative data can now deliver the same structure and actionability as never before.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys are commonly used mostly for their numbers, but not the customers’ comments. Comments from both Promoters and Detractors can be aggregated with other data sources to paint a more complete picture linking customer experience and brand advocacy.
Remember, it’s essential to monitor and gather feedback from multiple sources to obtain a comprehensive view of customer sentiment and brand health. Each source provides unique insights and helps you understand your customers’ experiences and brand perceptions.
Check out our ‘About BrandTrack’ page to understand how we translate customer feedback into actionable insights for your brand health. Better yet, check out our sample BrandTrack dashboard here to see it in action.
