As a business owner, you’re likely used to making data-driven decisions. But, how often does that data accurately reflect customer sentiment? Most, if not all, business decisions should be made with the customer as a priority. 

But aside from data, there are qualitative aspects of your service that may seem harder to measure. What looks great on paper might not be popular with customers. The opposite may also be true––you could have popular products or services that don’t drive much revenue.

Finding the right combination of profitability and customer satisfaction is the tightrope you walk as a business owner. Teeter too far to one side and you’ll be praying there’s a net to catch you. 

Missteps can be costly to businesses––you run the risk of pouring time, energy, and money into something that ultimately doesn’t drive revenue. GatherUp gives you the map you need to prioritize customer experience and achieve your business goals. 

How?

GatherUp provides data points that reflect customer sentiment. Today, we’ll look at 4 eye-opening reports you can use to evaluate customer experience, satisfaction, and what you need to improve. 

1. Capture customer sentiment across reviews 

Within the Insights Report, view the Impact Chart to see a snapshot of what your customers feel about your business. 

Green keywords show the elements of your business that customers feel positive about. While red keywords show the subjects that customers mention negatively in reviews. 

Just by analyzing these keywords, you’ll get a feel for which areas of your business require improvement. These insights should then be passed onto leadership and executive teams to analyze customer experience. 

Using the Sentiment Report, get a deeper analysis of keywords so you know where to focus your efforts. For instance, the keywords “Queso” and “Salsa”, have some of the highest sentiment ratings among all the keywords mentioned in the reviews. 

An opportunity exists for marketing, menu, and website design, as well as upsell opportunities from the wait staff. 

Conversely, we have “order”, “minute”, and “time” as the keywords with the lowest sentiment. Restaurant operations and training teams could take a deeper look at order accuracy and the time it takes for orders to be prepared so that they can begin increasing that sentiment rating over time. 

This customer feedback could also shape future training sessions so that team members improve their order and time management. 

The final example of using Insights Report is in the “Trends” section. Here you will be able to measure the changes you make to your business. For instance, in the example above we can see 2 mentions of “order” in the past 30 days, versus 3 in the previous 30 days. 

This could mean the restaurant improved their order accuracy and fewer people are mentioning order with a negative sentiment. Conversely, if we see more mentions of “salsa” or “queso” we know that our marketing or service staff are getting better at promoting those menu items.

Read more: What is online reputation monitoring & why you should do it

2. Measure performance by topic or theme

GatherUp’s Tagging system allows you to organize feedback by a specific topic or theme. Tags can be product lines, services, providers, technician names, or sentiment around your customer service, atmosphere, and many more. 

You can tag customers when you add them and the feedback from that customer will have that specific tag assigned to it. Or you can retroactively add tags. Auto-Tagging allows our system to comb through all reviews. The tag will be assigned to any review that mentions the pre-assigned keywords. 

We recommend including this in your team meetings. In each meeting, when you’re talking through product performance you’ll now have a clear view of customer sentiment for that product line. 

If your training staff wants to look at the service over the past month, you can find those metrics within the Success Report:

By filtering with the keyword “Service,” you can see the NPS, and 3rd-party reviews showing the overall rating and total score.

You can do this with any keyword mentioned in your reviews to see how customers perceive different elements of your business. 

Pro tip: Any Tag in GatherUp can also have its own Tag Widget to display those content-specific reviews on the corresponding web page. For example, if a juice cafe business has a Cleanse page, you could stream reviews that mention “cleanse” to the Cleanse page. Now you have regularly updated, keyword-rich content on more pages of your website! 

Learn more about repurposing reviews: The 5X review strategy 

3. Measure and benchmark feedback requests to drive improvement among those interactions

The Performance Report shows your Net Promoter Score (NPS). Think of this as your “word of mouth index.” When customers answer the NPS question, they’re telling you on a 0-10 scale how likely they are to recommend you to a friend or colleague. This score shows you if your business is likely to grow based on word-of-mouth recommendations. 

It also acts as a good barometer of how satisfied your customer base is with your business offering overall.

Sometimes the score itself doesn’t tell the whole story. Beyond an NPS score, the report also gives you a breakdown of Promoters and Detractors. Knowing how many of your customers had a positive or negative experience gives you an overview of how much work you have to do. 

One of the main benefits the Performance Report provides is a breakdown of how successful your feedback requests are. 

You can see: 

• The number of feedback requests you’ve sent
• How many have been opened
• How many customers have left feedback
• How many have clicked through to an online review site

Conversion is king and this snapshot lets you know how successful your requests are. From these numbers, you can then split test your copy to convert more customers into feedback and online reviews. 

Take a look at our webinar on how to do this. 

4. A centralized review hub can help enhance your online reputation

The Reviews Report gives you information on the online review sites you’re monitoring with GatherUp. We love it because it shows you all your reviews in one central location. Say goodbye to having to swap between Google, Facebook, and other 3rd-party review sites just to see your customer reviews. 

The best part of this report is that it shows all the reviews and content on one screen, with the ability to compare different locations if you have more than one. This gives you unparalleled knowledge of your online reputation in one simple view. 

You can see:  

• Your Overall Review Rating, which lets you know your total number of reviews and average score from across your different review sites
• The Rating Types with a breakdown of how many reviews you’ve received of each star rating
• A breakdown of your Review Sources so you can know how you’re doing on each review sites
• A graph that shows how your online review sites are doing month over month 
• A historical view of all reviews ever left on your review sites

Seeing this information is helpful for your marketing, PR, product development, operations, and customer service teams. Share it so every member of your team knows what customers love and loathe about your company. This leads to improvement of your offering and how you market your business. 

Learn more: how to use customer reviews to improve your business

Use GatherUp reports to enhance customer experience 

These are just a few of the tools available at your disposal with a GatherUp account. If knowledge is power, GatherUp is the source! Access in-depth data and customer sentiments to see how you can improve your business offering to match customer expectations. 

When your business delights customers, it’ll continue to grow. But before you delight customers, you need to understand how they truly feel about your offering. 

Ready to take control of your online reputation? Enjoy a free 14-day trial of GatherUp and improve your customer experience.