What Is This Metric?
Review Ratings are the reviews that your customers give about your company.
In some cases, you might track your reviews on public sites like Amazon or Google.
Or you maybe you have your own website like Growthink Reviews where you allow customers to leave feedback, reviews and/or testimonials.
In any case, monitoring these reviews is important.
Why Should I Care?
More and more customers check reviews before making product purchases.
In fact, The ROBO Economy report by Bazaar Voice found that eighty-two percent (82%) of smartphone users researched products on their phones before buying them in store.
Online, the report found that 45% of consumers read reviews before making a purchase.
And clearly, if your company has negative reviews, it’s not going to bode well for the prospective customer to buy from you.
What to Track?
There are two metrics to track here in most cases.
The first is reviews about your company. Do customers like doing business with you? Do they say positive things about you?
The second is reviews about your individual products and services. While your company might be great. And most of your products might be great. You need to make sure that every product or service you offer has positive reviews (or do something about it)!
The final question is what time period to use to track your company and product/service ratings.
Most executives might think that tracking and showing today’s rating on a dashboard is good enough.
I unfortunately disagree. Let’s say you’re review rating is currently a 4.1.
Yes, that’s pretty good. But, what if you used to have 1,000 ratings and a 4.9 average.
To go from the 4.9 to a 4.1 means you’ve recently received tons of negative reviews.
That’s why I like to ideally track and visualize reviews for the past 24 months.
This way you can see how your reviews have/are changing over time. And if, for some reason, there’s seasonality to your reviews (e.g., you get better or worse reviews during certain times of year), this will be accounted for.
In other cases (e.g., a hot market or new product launch) you may want to collect and assess your customer reviews weekly or even daily.
For instance, when a new smartphone enters the market, there may be hundreds if not thousands of new reviews each day.
The manufacturers of these products need to assess these reviews promptly, particularly if they provide feedback they can use to improve their products or even the perception of their products.
All in all, in today’s transparent economy, we all must do a better job collecting and analyzing our customer review ratings.
