Determine Which Factors Matter Most

By far the most important step - decide which areas of your business impact your customers most. A good way to do that is to consider: “What affects the happiness of our customers?” and go from there. As you can probably guess, there are a lot of things you can measure. The goal is to narrow them down.

Here’s an example of what those questions could look like:

Example:

Let’s say you’re a furniture retailer, and want to determine how you can win more repeat business with improved products and services.

Here are the questions you might decide to test first:

1. Which personnel are our standout performers?
2. Which locations offer the best service?
3. Which products make the happiest customers?

Next, start tracking

Once you’ve determined which questions you need answered, it’s time to set up tracking. With Trustpilot, you can create ‘tags’ and then automatically attach them to reviews to compare the performance of different areas.

Here are some tags the retailer above could use to answer their questions:

1. Sales rep name (one tag for each rep)
2. Store Number (‘#123,’ ‘#124’)
3. Product name (‘Alpine loveseat,’ ‘Willow sofa,’ etc.)

You can use data from your sales system to automatically pre-tag each review invitation with the right info (i.e: this customer ordered this product, from this sales rep, at this store location), so when the consumer leaves a review it’s already tagged appropriately. This will save you a ton of time in the long run.

Step 3: Analysis

Now for the fun part: reaping the rewards.

Let’s look at the insights our example retailer, the furniture company, could find after a few months of gathering tagged reviews.

1. Which personnel are our standout performers?

Relevant tags: ‘Sales rep name’

Findings

After tagging reviews with the sales reps name, the furniture store discovers which reps are associated with the highest ratings.

Example Learnings

If you implemented this in your business, you could create a customer satisfaction leaderboard for reps. Each month, the top performing reps could be recognized and rewarded for their good work, and consistent high performers incentivised to help coach and train other reps.

2. Which locations offer the best service?

Relevant tags: “Store Number”

Example Findings

Similar to the above situation, the furniture retailer could determine which stores are associated with the highest (and lowest) ratings.

Example Learning

If you discovered, say, your Northeast stores were performing really well, but your Southwest stores had consistently lower numbers, you could create an incentives program to inspire better service in individual locations. Managers of the highest performing branches could be rewarded by working with top management to create process improvements and training materials for all other branches.

Example Results

In addition to improving customer satisfaction, these improvements can sometimes lead to overall sales gains and a better reputation for your business.

3. Which products make the happiest customers?

Relevant tags: ‘Product name’

Example Findings

By pre-tagging products, the furniture retailer could determine which products lead to the happiest customers, and which items are lagging.

Example Learning

If you implemented the service, you might discover a certain product or department had consistently poor reviews. You could either evolve the product to meet the complaints (damaged corners, slow shipping time, confusing instruction manual) or discontinue.

Example Results

You could reduce overhead by finding these concerns, from the source. It’s harder to determine from a business rating which of your products are causing the most problems, and which are generating the most ROI - tagging and insights allows you to understand that kind of minutiae.