It may seem that there is nothing that can be done about negative reviews. However, sometimes negative reviewers can be transformed into enthusiastic customers. It all depends on how the feedback is handled. A Voice of Customer tool helps companies interpret feedback correctly and respond accordingly and change bad customer experience into a good one.
What Is the Voice of the Customer?
Voice of Customer Solutions listens to customer’s opinions, feedback, preferences, and criticisms. This strategy uses these as raw materials to produce customer insights that guide strategies to improve marketing and product development. Customers with a particular pain point may develop an affinity for a company that incorporates feedback and makes positive changes.
Voice of Customer involves gathering, analyzing, and implementing data into solutions. Communication with the consumer at every stage is essential to the Voice of Customer philosophy. VOC tools pinpoint customer sentiments regarding features and products and analyze different kinds of data. This guides innovation and improvement in customer experience.
Identifying the Negative Voice of Customer
Negative reviews can be challenging but necessary for upgrading products and features. They can be found wherever items are discussed on review sites and eCommerce platforms. Keeping track of negative reviews is essential with an app or software that will send notifications when a new review appears and change bad customer experience into a good one.
Retrieving reviews with a web scraper is more comfortable than the old-fashioned cut-and-paste approach. If there are dozens or hundreds of reviews, a web scraping tool can lift the HTML code and store the text in a database. The text should be clean of extraneous characters that interfere with the analysis. Besides, a web proxy is essential to disguise the user’s IP address and prevent blocking during the web scraping process.
When the content has been retrieved and prepared, sentiment analysis tools interpret the reviews and feedback for feelings and tone. It is easy to spot negative reviews, but sentiment analysis can read between the lines and locate discontent levels in the text.
Locate the Source of the Negative Voice of the Customer
After data collection and analysis, the next step is translating the results into innovation and improvement and change bad customer experience into a good one.
Product Flaws
Extensive testing may not reveal all of the potential flaws of a new product. The item may not seem defective, but user experience over some time can reveal specific issues that the company may not be aware of before the product release. Items should be periodically receiving updates, and negative reviews play a role in identifying features that require fixing.
When there are many negative comments about a particular feature, publicizing the product’s upgrade can make the consumer feel we hear their voices. When customers listen to it, they tend to reward this attention with sales and referrals.
Voice of Customer: Product Description
A copy of the product description is essential for introducing an item and its features to potential customers. Any inaccuracies in a product description will likely appear negatively by the customer. This reveals a need for carefully analyzing and editing descriptions before publication.
Negative reviews criticizing descriptions directly. Responding to the criticism, revising the product description carefully, and demonstrating to the reviewer that changes are implemented are good practices. The reviewer will be able to see that the company is responding directly to feedback.
Product Malfunction
Most companies are eager to address customer dissatisfaction by providing a replacement item free of charge, given certain conditions and a warranty. This issue often receives primary attention, with a customer directly bringing a breakage or malfunction to the company’s attention.
However, a problem can arise when dissatisfied customers air this complaint directly on a review site. Not only does this prolong the issue, but it makes the problem public, which can be embarrassing to the company. It is essential to address criticism that is public in the same forum and not to wait or seem eager to hush it up.
Offering to replace the item or provide a refund in direct response to the review will repair the company’s image and encourage a positive view of its customer service. In this sense, negative reviews provide an opportunity to highlight attention to customer experience.
Return and Shipment Policy
A company may not be aware of flaws in return and shipment until customers discuss these issues openly. It is essential to keep track of customer service tickets and notice comments that keep coming up before negative reviews start appearing.
Once reviews appear, responding concernedly to complaints about late shipments and faulty returns is essential. This reveals how the problem can be fixed. This may mean finding another service or upgrading processes. Showing tangible steps toward improvement will make an impression on customers.
Turning Negatives into Positives
A negative review doesn’t need to accept it. Negative comments can turn into positive reviews, depending on how this feedback is. Companies should be notified of negative reviews, respond to them constructively, and pinpoint tangible actions to fix the negative review problems.
Acting on VoC, even when negative, will impress customers and convert harsh critics into enthusiastic fans of a company or brand.
