Analysing Customer Reviews to Improve Your Business

Analysing customer reviews is just as important as collecting them. If you already collect reviews, you might be very satisfied with a 4-star customer rating. However, if you stop there, you’re missing out on some real insights from your customers.

Customer reviews are filled with feedback you can use to transform your online shop from good to great. In this article, we give you tips on which aspects of your reviews you should analyse and how to do this efficiently.

Why do you want to analyse reviews?

You're collecting reviews and regularly checking your star rating. That's the first step, but you can get so much more out of your customer reviews. Trusted Shops research shows that two out of three European shoppers leave a review to help others make an informed decision. This means your reviews are packed with valuable feedback, even if they give five stars.

4- and 5-star reviews are great for your online reputation, but they can also contain a lot of useful information to improve your business. Knowing what you’re doing right and what needs to improve is how you get more customers, stronger loyalty, and better conversions.

Quantitative vs. Qualitative Analysis of Your Reviews

Before you begin analysing your reviews, it might be helpful to understand the different types of analyses. There are qualitative analyses, but also quantitative analyses. These analyses yield various pieces of information, and sometimes you need to combine them to reach a conclusion.

• In quantitative research, you focus on figures that you can quickly collect and process in tables.
• In qualitative research, you look at the text itself and the meaning behind it.

Therefore, it's wise to use both, as they each provide different insights.

Examples of quantitative analysis

When you do quantitative research on your reviews, you look at, for example:

• Average rating score
• The number of reviews
• Rating distribution (e.g., how many times you received 5 stars and 1 star)
• Most mentioned keywords or specific words
• Length of the review

This method is objective, and the value can be expressed in exact figures.

Examples of qualitative analysis

When you do qualitative research on your reviews, you look at, for example:

• The tone/emotion of the review;
• Certain words that fit a particular theme (e.g. delivery);
• Suggestions or questions about specific features.

This method is subjective. You must therefore assign value to the data yourself.

Example of a complete analysis of a customer review

If your customer leaves a review stating “The order was delivered quickly” with 5 stars, you can take this out of the analysis:

Quantitative:

• 5 stars
• Text is 5 words long
• Delivery was mentioned once

Qualitative:

• Fast delivery is positive
• Review has a positive sentiment

Things only get more complicated when someone gives a 5-star rating and states, "The product is great, but the delivery took a long time." Quantitatively, it seems good, but qualitatively, you can see there's a complaint about the delivery. In the next chapter, we'll explain step by step how to perform the analysis.

Analyse your reviews step by step

Shutterstock/TA design

Now that we've got the theory down, it's time for the real deal: analysing your reviews.

Collecting feedback

It all starts with collecting reviews. By actively asking your customers for reviews, you'll gather not only reviews from dissatisfied customers, but also from customers who are happy with their order. This gives you a more balanced insight into the quality of your business.

If you collect reviews through a platform like Trusted Shops, you can have the system automatically send review requests at the perfect time. Not having to manually send emails yourself can save you a lot of time. Depending on your industry and the nature of your products, you can customise the timing of those review invites.

Recommended reading:
How to Handle Negative Reviews for Your Online Shop

Decide which metrics and KPIs you want to analyse

Decide exactly what you want to analyse. Which KPIs are important to you?

This includes both quantitative and qualitative research.

Some examples:

• Average rating score;
• Number of reviews;
• Percentage of 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 stars;
• The tone of the review (sentiment analysis);
• Net Promoter Score® (NPS).

Find more KPIs in this free infographic:

For qualitative research, you then write down the categories you want to examine, such as positive, neutral, and negative. Also, list the topics you want to explore, such as shipping/delivery, website/shop, product, customer service, payment, returns/cancellations, and sustainability.

Also, determine what time period you want to view and whether you want to view your information monthly so you can spot any trends.

Also, give weight to the figures you're going to analyse. When is it good and when could it be better? Because: Is five a lot? Five words in a review aren't much, but five stars are fantastic.

Collect and process the data

It is time to collect the data and then process it using calculations, for example.

You could, of course, do everything manually and count them yourself, but it's wise to explore which tools you can use to collect data. Most assessment platforms already provide a dashboard with a summary of your KPIs.

With Trusted Shops, for example, you can specify a period you want to look at and whether you want to compare it with another period. There, you'll see your total score, how often you received 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 stars, a brief history of your review score, and how many reviews you've received. If you also collect an NPS, you can easily download this data as an Excel file or access it using an API.

Help Centre article: How can I analyse the development of my collected reviews?

With the advent of AI tools, it's also possible to conduct qualitative research without having to manually review everything yourself. This is a fantastic development!

With a tool like Trusted Shops' Sentiment Analysis, AI collects and processes all your data, saving you time. It provides an overview of the sentiment score based on various categories, showing the distribution and the number of mentions. You can also specify a period and compare it with another.

Tip: If the tool you're using doesn't do this automatically, create graphs from your data. People are quite visual, and it helps you analyse everything in the next step. Colours are also helpful when analysing sentiment: green for positive sentiments, yellow for neutral, and red for negative sentiments.

Analyse and interpret the data

You've collected and processed all the data, now comes the most important part: the analysis.

Once you've created graphs, you can quickly see what trends exist, what you're already doing well, and where you can improve.

Also, try to figure out why something is going well and how something could be improved. You might be able to gather this from the reviews themselves, but sometimes you'll have to interpret the data yourself or even speak with colleagues.

Write down your conclusions and write a (short and concise) report of them, so that you can refer back to them in the future without having to repeat the entire research.

The next steps

You've done your analysis, you now know what's going on with your customers... what are you going to do next?

Take action

First, it's wise to take action. Your analysis has revealed several areas for improvement, so use this feedback concretely.

Tip: If you have multiple areas for improvement, prioritise them. Consider how many customers have encountered the issue, how serious the situation is, and how much effort it will take to address it. Addressing the issues that people complain about most will have the greatest impact on your review score.

When addressing problems, first try to understand why they arose. Talk to operational staff about what they think the company can do about them.

Is something wrong with the shipping company? Talk to them and try to find a solution. If that doesn't work, you could try a different company. Is something wrong with the sorting in your warehouse? Talk to the warehouse staff about what you can do to prevent mistakes.

Respond to the reviews

According to Trusted Shops research, nearly 80% of European shoppers find it important that online stores respond to every review or if the response adds value. Therefore, it's important to thank your customers for their feedback so they feel heard. It also provides another opportunity to strengthen the connection with your online store, which helps them remember your brand.

For many shoppers, seeing a shop make a mistake is not a deal breaker because everyone knows no person or company is perfect. It's more important how the shop resolves the issue. So, if someone gives feedback, you can indicate that you're working on it. It also shows other potential shoppers how you handle such cases.

With Trusted Shops' Smart Review Assistant, you can quickly summarise reviews and generate a response specifically for that review with a single click. This allows you to respond up to twice as fast.

Collect even more feedback

You can continue as you are, or try to gather even more feedback. Your online reputation might be good on one platform, but if all the other platforms are negative, the inconsistency in ratings is also a red flag to many shoppers.

Platforms like Trustpilot and Google Business Profile are open review platforms. This means you can direct your customers there to leave reviews (even if you're not a Trustpilot member). However, manually sending these review requests is a lot of work.

Want to automatically send review requests to Trusted Shops, Trustpilot, and Google Business Profiles? With Trusted Shops’ Reputation Manager, you can choose which percentage of your reviews is sent where.

Use your reviews in marketing

You can use the reviews and perhaps even your results in marketing. For example, consider an ad featuring your star rating or a fun review you've received.

You can also display your reviews in a widget on your website, so shoppers can see what customers are saying about you right there.

Source: myShop

See what your competitors are doing

As mentioned before, it's important to consider the value of metrics, but it also makes sense to check out what your competitors are doing. What are your competitors' metrics, and how are you doing compared to them? What are they doing better? What can you learn from your competitors?

To make things easier for you, Trusted Shops offers a competitor analysis. At a glance, you can see your dashboard compared to the dashboard of your chosen competitor.

Help Centre article: How does my company compare to the competition?

Set goals, monitor your data, and repeat the process

When making improvements, it's wise to set goals. This way, you'll know when you've done enough to improve your business in that regard and when it's time to focus on something else. For example, if you have too many returns, set a goal to reduce your returns by 20% in the next quarter. This might involve adjusting several things, such as product pages and optimising your warehouse.

Tip: If you collect reviews through Trusted Shops, you can easily set a monthly target for how many reviews you want to collect. You can see this in your Reviews Insights Dashboard.

It is therefore wise to continue monitoring your data, also because other problems may suddenly arise.

In addition, it's advisable to repeat your analysis periodically to ensure the quality of your business. Remember: the market is constantly changing, and external factors can impact your business. So be alert and act early to prevent a small problem from escalating into a major one.

Conclusion

Reviews aren't just a great way to attract shoppers; they're also packed with information you can use to improve your online store. If you only look at a star rating, you might miss out on valuable feedback. Analyse your reviews with the right tools and use this knowledge to stay ahead of the competition.