Trend Reports

To fully understand how your company is performing, you should measure your company’s performance over time to provide a more accurate frame of reference. This is accomplished by observing month over month (MoM) trends.

This is an example of a 12 month overview, plotting average rating vs quantity of reviews.

Utilizing graphs such as this one, a company can determine if they are collecting reviews consistently and if there have been any major changes to their average rating that warrant investigation.

Track goals and monitor performance for specific periods

It’s important to set goals to effectively track the success of your employees. We have explained in the past how companies can use certain types of goals to keep employees motivated, and inspired to do good work. As shown below, creating reporting that displays detailed breakdowns of key metrics can show performance by month and allow for internal goal tracking.

Using a similar report, your company can observe the breakdown of a number of statistics on a monthly basis. You can learn whether your business is maintaining quality reviews, and discern if a drop in your average rating was due to polarized ratings or other factors. When a company responds to their customers’ feedback, it demonstrates they are actively listening - and care about their opinions. One important target goal for your business should be response time. How fast, on average, is your company responding to reviews? Quick responses are beneficial, but responding to all negative reviews typically takes top priority.

Creating the reporting

Now that you’re convinced, let me explain how to go about creating a trend report for your reviews. Don’t worry; it’s simple enough. All you need is: 72 hours, 18 cups of coffee, and a “bumpin’” playlist. That or you can reach out to your Trustpilot contact for access to ours (whichever you think is easier).

Creating reports based on reviews can provide many valuable insights to businesses, but it can be hard to decide which aspects are most important to study. Our initial approach to reporting on reviews involved sentiment analysis, which examined the tone conveyed, and trend analysis, which looks at changes in the data over time.

Sentiment analysis compiles lists of words and correlates them with either positive or negative values. The type of data this report provides is interesting, but not very actionable. A trend analysis will provide a general overview to the health of your company, but is not granular enough.

Following our initial results, we decided to dive deeper into the data.

Ideally, the report would accurately track and monitor a business’s health, while providing the kind of granular information that would give a business insights into what needs to change to improve. We developed this report to help facilitate this goal.

Although our report was developed with Trustpilot customers in mind, it will be valuable to all businesses pulling customer feedback, who’d like to improve their business and beat the competition. Reach out to your Trustpilot Success manager to see about adding this to your solution.