The Future of Consumer Reviews
On one hand, thanks to the democratizing power of the Internet — and review sites and social media, in particular — consumer reviews have never been a more powerful force in the relationship between companies and consumers.
Point of Sale Surveys
“Yes,” you might be saying, “I already get this at the bottom of my receipt when I go to Burger King or Walmart.” No, what you actually get is an invite to navigate to a website or call a number and take five minutes of your day to take their survey, usually with the promise of a discount off your next purchase. Or another current favorite is sending a periodic email to your customers with a big headline at the top: “How did we do?” The problem with these approaches is that it takes a special kind of customer to go to all that trouble long after they’ve left your business. Those who do are hardly representative of your customers as a whole, in the same way news polls are always skewed because only people who enjoy phone surveys participate.
Emotion Recognition
What’s easier than getting customers to submit a review or fill out a survey? How about reading their minds by reading their facial expressions? What if you could recognize how your customers felt about their experience with you without even having to ask them? You probably know that facial recognition software is already in use by governments and private companies to spot individuals in a crowd. As part of the burgeoning facial recognition industry, however, new apps are emerging that will allow you to read customers’ emotions based on the movement of points on their faces.
In the present, consumers, in general, provide a wealth of data online about how they feel about the products and services they consume. They do this on forums, message boards, and social media. The problem is, extracting this data from everything else, scooping it all together, and making sense of it has been so difficult that companies have opted instead to just ask consumers to tell them directly.
The problem, in turn, with asking directly is that consumers’ responses take on subtle, but important, inaccuracies. Some consumers might be soften the blow and sugarcoat their answers. Others will seize the opportunity to punish companies they dislike by being overly harsh.
New companies are emerging that sweep the Internet for the language consumers use about companies and look for patterns in that language. Relative Insight, for example, can collect millions of words from parenting forums to find patterns in how they talk about parenting, but also about companies and how they compare to their rivals.