How Unstructured Feedback Impacts Consumer Purchasing Decisions?

Sixty percent of customers always conduct online research before making a significant purchase, and 43 percent read user reviews when looking for information on items they may wish to buy.

FREMONT, CA: Typically, customer feedback falls into one of two kinds. Structured feedback gets collected in the form of surveys and replies. Then there's unstructured feedback - in a nutshell, everything else.

From Google reviews to Twitter comments to Amazon ratings, unstructured feedback seems all over the internet. Unstructured data constitute 80-90 percent of all data. And more are created all the time. While organized input gets sought, unstructured feedback is not. When pleased or dissatisfied consumers want to spread the word about your product or service, they will. Hundreds of thousands of data points can be helpful to gain insights from unstructured input. That's much too many for manual processing.

Here's where reputation management enters the picture. Unstructured input is vital, but organizations will need assistance to turn it into valuable insights. Because of the volume of behavioral data collected daily, businesses can no longer afford to neglect unstructured information and feedback. Understanding the company's reputation is an integral part of gauging customer experience.

• Recognize the Importance of Feedback to the Customer Journey

Improving the customer experience is a top objective for many companies customer service departments. It's why it's critical to collect and respond to consumer feedback. Companies cannot provide a good customer experience unless they know how consumers feel about a particular product or service.

When customers encounter a service or product, they frequently use internet channels to express their feelings. It is up to the organization to be on the lookout for this feedback and collect it from wherever their consumers are.

Customers, after all, are reading the reviews and acting on what they read. Sixty percent of customers always conduct online research before making a significant purchase, and 43 percent read user reviews when looking for information on items they may wish to buy.

• Collect the Data

Platforms enabling reputation experience management (RXM) gets intended to narrow the gap between online reputation management and the consumer experience. These consumer data systems use artificial intelligence to collect data from millions of touchpoints and store it in a single spot. Live chats, and NPS surveys are examples of touchpoints. Platforms like this simplify collecting data and storing it in a centralized area for quick analysis.

• Rely on Human Insight

Artificial intelligence (AI) may assist businesses in managing an overwhelming volume of comments, reviews, and social media mentions. The technology consolidates that material into a single, readily consumable spot. However, AI can only take things so far.