Customer Experience Show-and-Tell
People love to show and tell what’s going on in their lives with whoever will listen. That’s why social media and online reviews are such popular channels for customers to broadcast their brand experiences.
These outlets for sharing experiences are more than just far-reaching. They’re fast, convenient, and relatable.
Social Reviews Dissected
To understand the popularity of social-driven online reviews, let’s look at the three main pieces of an online review:
1. Easily digestible ratings (e.g., the 5-star scale)
This makes reviews instantly informative with just a quick scan.
2. Personal experience commentaries
Customers trust and relate to reviews, because they’re written by their peers, using their terms—not easily spotted corporate speak.
3. Connection to products or services of interest
Today, choices abound and consumers are selective with their dollars. The attachment of reviews to specific products & services makes them very important to customers.
Social reviews are popular because today’s consumer is a different breed than yesterday’s. People are more careful with their money now, and reviews help people shop wisely—or at least feel like they do—in a matter of minutes, before spending their hard-earned cash.
Reviews. Surveys. Feedback.
When you break down a review into its parts, the same things that make them popular and useful to the public are the same things that make customer surveys popular with companies. They provide digestible, relatable information about things that matter—things that hit them in the pocketbook.
The one big difference is reliability. The majority of online customer reviews are unverified and have been shown to often inaccurately reflect the quality of service you can expect to receive. Mindshare ensures the validity of its OpenTell℠ customer reviews are as accurate and reliable as its VoC data.
With that being the case, shouldn’t survey responses and customer reviews look more similar? At Mindshare, we are able to simplify our client surveys using advanced text analytics, allowing customers to leave feedback the way they prefer, and still give companies the actionable, digestible information they need for improving business results.
