Learn From Your Customers

Trustpilot: your consumer behavior experts

Thursday 11 July 2024
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Every marketer’s goal is to better understand their audience.

Understanding consumer behavior is key to a successful business. This is pretty much common knowledge. But understanding consumer behavior is far from easy or simple. 

What might not be common knowledge is that Trustpilot is for far more than just for collecting reviews. We’re also consumer behavior experts, whether you’re looking to understand consumers in your industry or for your business specifically. And we not only share those behavior insights with our customers, we even generate consumer behavior insights specific to their own businesses for them to help them continually grow and improve their businesses. 

Customer reviews are a treasure trove for consumer insights 

Purchasing from or interacting with a business can be an emotional experience. There are an endless amount of glowing reviews on our platform from when a customer has a wonderful experience. There are also many from when a customer was absolutely livid and wanted to let the world know. All of these reviews tell a story and when we look at trends across them, we can learn a lot about consumer behavior. 

Even three star reviews that are right in the middle can contain very valuable insights for businesses. Our software can automatically detect the single topic with a negative sentiment in a review that took what could have been a four or five star experience and turned it into a three star one. This helps businesses see small things — that are often easy to fix — that can be adjusted to turn moderately satisfied customers to delighted ones, something businesses often struggle with.

Consumer insights that we’ve made public 

You don’t necessarily need to be a Trustpilot customer to get access to some of these insights, either. We’ve published consumer insights from our platform to try and take the learnings from consumer behavior on our platform and publish them so that any businesses can benefit from them. 

When we published Trends, truths, and triggers: How 2.6M financial service reviews will make you rethink your strategy, we analyzed all of the financial service review trends on our platform to see what might be helpful for anyone in that industry.  From there we shared useful takeaways for other finance businesses on our platform, to help them create better experiences for their own customers. 

This included things like pointing out that the use of “AI” in financial services reviews had skyrocketed, mostly in negative reviews where a reviewer couldn’t reach a real person. And that over 3,500 financial service businesses were called out for sending spam in their reviews. These insights help other businesses in the space see what their customers are likely to care about. 

By making it easier for a customer to reach an actual person and being clearer about opt-ins for communications and more intentional about how many communications they send, they can easily stand out from their competitors since these are some of the areas making customers in their industry the most frustrated. 

Our mission has always been to create more trust between consumers and businesses and that doesn’t just apply to the businesses that are our customers. If we can publish insights like this and help businesses better understand consumer behavior so that they can create better experiences for their own customers, then that gets us one step closer to accomplishing our mission.

Helping businesses get insights from their own customers 

Of course, if you are a Trustpilot customer then you’re able to get consumer insights tailored to your customers specifically. Every business is different, even within the same industry. Understanding how your customers think and feel helps you deliver exactly the experience they’re looking for, to keep them coming back for more. And Trustpilot has tools that make this incredibly easy and automatically deliver you these insights on a regular basis. 

LoveBook uses AI powered review insights to see how they are performing (in the minds of their customers) on everything from website to product quality. Each time they release a new feature they create a custom Review Insights topic to track sentiment around that release so they can measure how their customers feel about the feature. This allows them to make changes in near real-time to tailor the feature to their customers' needs, and allows releases to be an ever improving launch instead of sending a new feature out into the wild and hoping it works for their customers. 

Evri’s tech team gets Review Insights regarding their app to help them identify new areas for improvement in their UX. It’s made them aware of problems they didn’t even know existed and after some work on their site they even went on to win app of the year. 

Paying attention to your customer reviews and TrustScore is a great start to better understanding your customers. But with large volumes of reviews, this can start to get pretty challenging. Trustpilot automates the insights from your customer reviews to help you easily understand the biggest opportunities for you to improve your business, based on trends in your customer reviews that you probably wouldn’t have noticed on your own. That way you can spend more time making changes to improve your business and less time trying to understand what your customers want. 

Tailored consumer behavior data at your fingertips 

How many decisions around your product are made based on consumer behavior data, versus opinions or gut feelings? Or trends in your industry around consumer preferences? Many businesses take a reactive approach to this, waiting until things go wrong. Instead of keeping a pulse on customer sentiment so that they can make the right changes in real-time. Or they will spend an enormous amount of time monitoring industry sentiment to try and get ahead of it, when reporting could just be automated and delivered to them on a regular basis. 

What about your marketing and messaging? Are you spending large amounts of your budget on consumer testing to see what messaging sticks? You could be tailoring your messaging around the insights in your customer reviews (emphasizing more on the topics and trends that come up in your ecstatic reviews and less on the ones that appear in your reviews with lower sentiment scores). 

The same goes for customer service. Many businesses spend money and time struggling to understand exactly what their customers want and how to best interact with them. But all of this data already exists in your customer reviews, and we can easily pull the insights for you. This way you don’t need to spend any more time and money trying to understand what your customers want. You will always already know.  

Are you ready for the insights that will help your business improve and grow? Request a demo today to learn more about how Trustpilot can deliver you the insights you need to deliver the experience your customers actually want. 

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