Top Customer Review Data Sources You Need To Leverage

High-quality customer review data sources help you understand customer, product, and brand experience for insightful business decisions. A company’s marketing strategy involves below-the-line as well as above-the-line techniques. Customer experience analysis is important for both. That’s why the more sources of customer review data you use, the more accurate and holistic your understanding of your audience and changing market dynamics will be.

In this article, we take a look at the major sources of customer review data, why they are so important from a business perspective, and how exactly you can extract vital information from them.

What Are The Major Sources Used For Customer Review Analysis?

The most important customer review data sources are those that give the most relatable and easily available information about products and services. These include Google reviews, Reddit, OpenTable, and more. Let’s take a better look at them.

1. Google

The most popular search engine and one of the most important sources of customer review data, leveraging Google reviews to analyze customer, brand, and product insights is a no-brainer.

Google allows you to post reviews anonymously or otherwise through its GoogleMaps link. Customers can write their experience with products and services, and also post pictures directly on the website or through the mobile app.

There are articles that even help people write reviews for Google. So you can only imagine how popular and valuable a data source Google reviews can be for companies that want to leverage it for customer and market research.

2. Trustpilot

Trustpilot is a reliable customer feedback forum that gets around 1 million reviews every month. It hosts both B2B product reviews as well as B2C reviews. You can use the website to boost your own SEO ranking and brand awareness by getting more and more customers to review you. And at the same time, analyze all the feedback to extract important CX insights.

3. Glassdoor

Glassdoor is a popular website that is used by current and former employees to post their reviews and opinions about their employers, as well as by potential candidates who write about their interview experiences.

When research says that you can figure out the longevity of a business based on happy or unhappy employees and how satisfied they are with a company, it’s true. In the same vein, when a hedge fund company came to Repustate wanting to analyze and predict the trajectory of one of their customer’s future financial positions, they found results that were along the same lines.

That’s why Glassdoor can be an important source of knowing the health of a company on a B2B level before you take them on as a partner or client.

4. Reddit

Among the many customer review data sources that are crowdsourced, Reddit has increasingly been climbing to the top slot. What makes Reddit different from others is that it allows conversations where people genuinely want to connect with each other and offer opinions and help. That’s why Reddit and subreddit posts are commonly used not only for customer reviews but also for random conversation topics such as “Does anyone else find the actor in XYZ movie boring?”

At the same time, the website is used by companies for subtle marketing tactics like hosting question and answer sessions with customers and for troubleshooting.

All this makes Reddit sentiment analysis a critical tool for you to leverage for important market trends, customer experience insights, and brand awareness metrics.

5. Amazon

Amazon reviews is one of the most common platforms for discovering vital information about your product, service, or brand. Amazon encourages people to share their opinions by submitting a review and helping other customers make purchasing decisions. People have the choice to submit product feedback by either simply choosing a star rating, or accompanying it with a comment and even uploading pictures or videos.

6. TikTok

TikTok is a very popular app that is now also interlinked with Facebook, which has compounded its popularity even more. The app is a short-video host that is used by all kinds of demographics for various reasons, not surprising when you realize that it has more than 1 Billion subscribers.

TikTok also has a business side that is called TikTok for Business, which is used by companies for advertising and other marketing tactics including Influencer marketing. Given this, the platform is one of the most prolific customer review data sources.

That’s why TikTok social listening is a game-changer for companies that are looking to increase their market share, improve their products and services, and amplify their brand.

7. Douyin

Douyin is the Chinese version of TikTok, meant for the Chinese population, and is one of the most successful apps for business generation and profits. Because the demographic that uses Douyin is more nuanced, has more spending power, and is more open to foreign goods and services, various high-end businesses such as Versace, Tiffany & Co, and Rolex leverage the platform to reach such clientele.

Repustate is one of the few companies in the world that offer Douyin insights for business intelligence and incremental revenue strategies.

8. Instagram

Instagram social listening can give you granular insights about your brand from comments, conversations, and the video itself. You can use the platform as one of your top customer review data sources, leveraging it for important marketing decisions. You can use it for your Influencer marketing program, social media campaigns, targeted audience content, social media alerts, customer interactions, brand amplification campaigns, or any other function based on data-driven insights.

9. YouTube

YouTube is known to be the source that has made many an individual into an overnight star just by the power that the platform has for brand amplification and exposure. That’s why the platform is used by customers and businesses alike for both user-generated content as well as brand videos.

Comments make the website even more acute for customer engagement and product review analysis. You can harness all the product and customer insights seamlessly from the platform through YouTube comments analysis.

10. OpenTable

OpenTable is an online restaurant reservation website, but one that is also used by customers for posting reviews that others find very helpful. An important SAAS platform for the hospitality industry, OpenTable is accessed by thousands of people for fine-dining options, takeaways, boutique local restaurants, hidden gems with rare cuisine offerings, and more.

OpenTable is one of the sources of customer review data that Repustate’s customer experience analytics platform, Repustate IQ, seamlessly extracts customer and brand sentiment from.

11. Review podcasts

Podchaser, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other podcast platforms host a variety of product review podcasts. These resources can be leveraged for product insights by analyzing them for sentiment through multimedia content analysis that makes audio analysis as easy as text analysis for customer sentiment.

12. Twitter

Twitter is one of the best customer review data sources. You can cover all that’s trending with Twitter and stay up-to-date with new developments in almost all areas of business including real-time stock prices and news.

You can obtain customer experience data, product and service insights, emerging trends, and such with AI-driven Twitter sentiment analysis in real-time as well as with historical data.

13. News

Apart from Twitter, you can analyze all online news sources easily through news sentiment analysis. This includes news videos, comments, articles, podcasts,and related content.

14. Youku

Youku is one of the largest Chinese language video streaming platforms in the world, and gets more than 1.8 billion views a day. Apart from hosting more than 4000 movies, the platform is also great for brand advertising. Albeit, because of its expensive ad pricing, the platform is mostly used by premium brands like Apple, General Motors, and Chinese mega brands for a high-end audience.

A sentiment analysis platform with native multilingual capability can easily analyze all the customer comments from the channel and provide fine-grained brand insights that are invaluable for forging brand and product marketing strategies.

15. Xbiao

One of the largest watch reviews and news websites, Xbiao is the go-to platform for anyone who wants to purchase premium watches like Omega, Rolex, Vacheron Constantin, Hermes, and others. Xbiao, however, caters only to Chinese audiences, most of whom are watch collectors and connoisseurs.

Again, with a solution that can analyze Chinese languages in the native tongue, without using machine translations, you can efficiently receive valuable brand information, competitor insights, sentiment trends across time periods, aspect sentiments, and more.

What Is The Importance Of Customer Reviews Analysis?

There are irrefutable ways in which customer review data sources prove to be important for businesses, such as the following.

1. Product improvement roadmap

Customer review data sources, like those mentioned above, can clearly indicate the direction in which your product innovations and improvement should go.

2. Better targeted marketing

Through analyzing sentiment in feedback data, you can easily see how you can create engaging marketing strategies based on different customer demographics.

3. Track customer motivations

When you use various sources of customer review data you can discover the many ways in which different types of customers are motivated to complete a purchase or refer you to others.

4. Better customer service

It is often believed that customer reviews are mostly filled with complaints. But this can be of great benefit to a company that is genuinely interested in increased customer satisfaction, for it can use this data to improve its customer service effectively.

5. Improved brand experience

Brand experience is not just limited to a transaction but to a person’s personal feelings based on their interaction with the brand - whether when seeing their advertisement, attending an event, or visiting a store. Customer reviews can thus give you many insights on how to improve your brand experience metrics.

6. Market gap analysis

Reviews can also give you very important information about where your product is missing the mark in filling the gap in the market and what you can do to counter this.

7. Competitor analysis

You can analyze how your competitors are faring on the satisfaction scale compared to you in relation to similar products, services, additional customer benefits, and other factors. Use TikTok insights or gather intelligence from Trustpilot or subreddit posts, the choice is yours based on your business and industry.

8. Discover emerging market trends

As dynamics evolve in everyday lives, so do customer needs. Analyzing a myriad of customer review data sources can tell you what the emerging trends in the market are so you are prepared for them through product and service innovation.

9. Predict business performance

Customer and employee reviews can tell you how well a company is performing and how sustainable its growth patterns look. Satisfied customers and happy employees coupled with good revenues generally translate into business longevity. However, unhappy customers and disgruntled employees can suggest that a business may be unstable.

10. Invest in customer retention programs

Sources of customer review data should be leveraged to get quality insights for improving customer experience, which can lead to improved loyalty through effective customer retention strategies.

How Is Sentiment Analysis On Reviews Done?

Feedback from customer review data sources needs to be analyzed in a methodical manner for sentiment. For this, we need an AI-based sentiment analysis platform that is built to discover, contextualize, and deliver accurate customer experience and brand insights.

Repustate’s sentiment analysis API conducts sentiment analysis on customer reviews in the following manner.

Step 1. Data Gathering

First, the data needs to be collected from the sources that you think are the most relevant to your business. You can either upload the comments and reviews in an excel file or directly input the URL of the source such as Google, TikTok, TrustPilot, Reddit, etc.

Step 2. Data Processing

The machine learning (ML)-driven customer review analysis platform processes all the data you have gathered using various ML techniques such as natural language processing (NLP), text analytics, semantic clustering, etc. to discover and extract topics, themes, and aspects from it. For example, it will analyze thousands of comments in a second and categorize them into various aspects it discovers such as “price”, “food”, “packaging”, “customer service”, “cleanliness”, etc.

Step 3. Applying Review Sentiment Analysis

Now that the feedback from the various sources of customer review data has been broken down into finer data points, the sentiment analysis API will analyze each of them for sentiment.

Sentiment scores can range from -1 for negative emotions, 0 for neutral feelings, and 1 for positive sentiments. You can get a holistic, overall sentiment score of your product or brand, as well as an aspect-based sentiment analysis of each aspect, theme, and topic that the platform discovered about your business from the reviews.

Step 4. Visualizing the Insights

All the insights are now available in the form of charts and graphs that you can view on either Repustate IQ’s customer experience dashboard. If you’ve chosen the Repustate API, then you can integrate it into other visualization tools like Power BI or Tableau.

Share these reports with the relevant business and marketing teams, and change aspects and entities based on your changing requirements without any coding.

Conclusion

Repustate’s CX analytics platform allows you to analyze customer reviews to get customer engagement and experience insights, competitor insights, market motivators, emerging market trends, and brand insights.

Highly flexible, the Repustate IQ platform gives you the flexibility to add or remove aspects, derive overall brand sentiment, individual aspect-emotion insights, set alerts for social mentions, and many other significant functions.

Choose from the many customer review data sources the platform can mine insights from and boost your marketing and branding strategies with AI-driven computing.

Book a free trial today!