5 types of customer reviews to improve your customer experience

Published on August 17, 2022  - Updated on December 05, 2023

5 types of customer reviews to analyze to improve the customer experience

Whether in B2B or B2C, customer reviews play a very important role in the success of a business. Whether it's before purchasing a product or software, booking a hotel or restaurant, we all look at customer reviews before making our purchase decision. As a company, the reviews left by your customers, whether on public platforms (such as TripAdvisor, Google Reviews, TrustPilot) or as a result of surveys, are real mines of information on the customer journey or on the experience with your brand.

By semantically analyzing these comments, you will gain valuable insights to improve your customers' satisfaction and thus increase your revenue.

To get the most accurate results possible, it is very interesting to combine emotion with this semantic analysis.

Highlight customer nuggets

You know: your customers experience emotions during their journey and some of them communicate them to you via customer reviews or in the comments of your satisfaction surveys.

Thanks to semantic and emotional analysis, the precise decoding of comments now makes it possible to analyze written sources such as reviews. Reading emotions is now possible on your surveys or web reviews. Among all the comments, some express unique experiences and the levels of sensitivity in the analysis allow you to distinguish the nuggets from the mass of comments often called "noise".

How to highlight the most extraordinary experiences? 

How do you take into account the most painful or distressing experiences? 

With the most elaborate tools on the market - such as the cxinsights.io platform by Q°emotion - it is now easy to extract them... without having to read 50,000 verbatims.

In this article we will look at 5 different comment selections that you should look for in your text data and customer reviews:

- The enchantment point

- The wow effect

- The stories

- The irritating point

- The risk of attrition

These selections are now available in direct reading in the CXinsights.io platform on all your projects.

The essential selection to extract from the verbatims: delight and irritation, wow effect, risk of customer attrition and stories.

To extract these elements easily, the first step is to do an emotional analysis and not just a sentiment analysis (positive, negative, neutral).

Indeed, by performing a semantic, thematic and emotional analysis (you go beyond a simple sentiment analysis to obtain an emotional analysis), the characterization of the emotional tone is accompanied by an evaluation of the level of emotional insistence which is key to guarantee a good level of reliability in the analyses. It is a question of qualifying BUT ALSO quantifying the emotion in the speech (these two initials were originally the initials of the Q°emotion brand).

Thanks to this often underestimated intensity criterion, we can highlight and underline here particular verbatims, worthy of interest because they are concentrates of emotions. We strongly encourage you to read them because they express a customer insistence, a virulence in the comments that goes beyond the rest of the comments. 

We have highlighted the following selections in particular:

1) Enchantment

Definition: What is customer delight? 

Comments that mark enchantment are also called enchanted verbatims, enchantment points, or sometimes ultra-satisfied comments. 

These reviews have a particularly high and insistent level of joy. The customer will support his or her words with emphasis markers: capitalization, punctuation, superlative, repetition, positive exaggeration words, emoji, etc.

Why is knowing the enchantment points essential to animate the customer experience? 

Delighted customers are more likely to promote the brand or service to their friends and family. Listening to them will allow you to extract exemplary verbatims, of what to do, allowing you to encourage or congratulate the teams.

2) WOW effect

Definition: What is the WOW effect or WAHOO effect? 

The WOW effect is a recognition by the customer that the service provided is in some aspects well beyond expectations and that the customer is very positively surprised and fulfilled. The customer has had an extraordinary experience and wants to thank you for it. Generally, this is because the customer is considered better than he is used to. We can say that the customer is "sublimated". The customer can also be enthusiastic about the innovative, revolutionary or disruptive character of a service or product. Sometimes a simple detail can cause a WOW effect in the customer. The example of silver airline salt shakers is often cited to show that detail can transform an experience and become a memorable point that crystallizes a good service and makes it WOW.

We spot these reviews in the comment set through emotional analysis because they usually have a significant element of surprise. Like the delighted customer, the customer under the influence of the WOW effect (or Wahoo effect) will also support his words with markers of insistence: superlative, repetition, words of positive exaggeration, emoji, capitalization, punctuation, etc.

Why is knowing the WOW effect essential to animating the customer experience? 

The WOW effect often shows that the perceived experience can be played out on infirm parts of the service and does not necessarily involve cost inflation. Customers who are sublimated in this way are particularly useful in distinguishing and recognizing which small attentions can take the experience from ordinary to good and from good to extraordinary. These details should be generalized. It is often necessary to test several attentions to choose the one that will provoke the expected wow effect.

3) Customer stories

Besides the enchantment points and the WOW effects, the CXinsights solution also allows you
to highlight another category of comments worthy of interest: the "stories" comments

Definition: What are "stories" comments? 

Among all the categories of comments and reviews mentioned here, story comments are probably the easiest to extract: they are the longest verbatims written by customers who want to describe their experience as precisely as possible. Usually the experience is negative, irritating, and the customer justifies a bad rating with a detailed explanation. 

Why is reading stories useful?

Stories are the most detailed comments and allow to get into the customer's skin. Like a qualitative interview with a customer, they describe in great detail the context, the reasons and the course of the experience. The customer may want to recreate a connection and often requires an appeal, or compassion for their painful experiences. 

To note: The client has often taken long minutes of their time to describe their experience and answer your question extensively. This is a very engaged customer. Services that take the trouble to thank these customers for their rich feedback and time spent are unfortunately still too rare. 

4) The irritating points

More painful, but essential to set up an improvement plan or an action plan of the customer experience, the comments of irritated customers or irritating points. 

Definition: What is a pain point or irritation point? 

A pain point is a cactus thorn stuck in the customer's foot on their journey. This strong pain is now anchored in the customer's memory in relation to your brand. The irritated customer will tell you why not only his expectations were not met, (leading to sadness and disappointment) but also how (or when) the boundaries of his acceptability space were crossed (leading to anger).

The primary emotions that best characterize the comments and opinions at this stage are
sadness-disappointment and anger expressed by the client. The threshold for anger in satisfaction survey comments is set at 5% of comments in most industries.

The commitment of the very unhappy customer is strong because the customer will try to justify the unjustifiable nature of the situation in which he has been placed. Sometimes they will even try to penalize you, insult you, threaten you to express that they want to recreate the distance (the vital space that has been crossed).

Why is reading irritated customers' comments useful?

Reading irritated comments allows you to establish a clear delineation of the perimeters of the experience that need to be improved. The customer's exasperation marks his or her boundary of acceptability: this boundary has probably been crossed several times and the customer is expressing it insistently and virulently. One way or another, compensation must be provided to restore trust. 

Beyond the customer himself, knowing the irritating points on the journey allows you to prioritize the most burning issues and to really know where to start.

Note: Don't expect everything from the customer. Criticism does not have to be constructive. Besides, the customer will not necessarily know or be able to bring you the solution to his problem. A bug on the website for example can be very disabling but too technical for the customer to be able to make proposals. He will almost always lack your objectives, the context that triggered the problem, the knowledge of your processes, and the knowledge of possible alternatives. 

This does not erase the legitimacy of the dissatisfied customer: the customer's problem is still your problem. The cactus thorn in the side (= the irritant) handicaps the long-distance runner (= the customer) enormously in crossing the finish line (= the new contract with you). The irritant slows down the customer and his circle of influence (non-recommendation or bad buzz). It inevitably pollutes the relationship between your customers and... your sales department.

If the irritant is there, it's because the initial service level promise has not been respected: the experience must be improved at all costs, or else we risk reaching a breaking point: attrition.

5) Declared attrition

The extreme limit for the customer: the verbal threat to leave, the declaration of attrition (or churn). 

Definition: What is an attrition comment? 

The risk of churn or declared attrition is a breaking point in the eyes of the customer. The experience, for whatever reason, has been a failure and the customer has made a decision. The primary emotion that best characterizes comments and reviews at this stage is disgust expressed by the customer. This emotion expresses a strong need for an alternative and for change. The threshold for disgust in satisfaction survey comments is set at 1% of comments in most industries.

At this point, if they express disgust in their review, it is often too late, the customer has already taken the step to leave you. The price of failure in the experience is directly an opportunity cost that impacts the bottom line. 

The main message here is: never resign yourself to the flow of departing customers who
are directly or indirectly of your making... Because if you do nothing, you will expose yourself to competing organizations that may be more agile than you. 

Why is reading feedback from departing customers useful?

Reading feedback from departing customers will rarely bring them back to you. However, you can learn from your mistakes - at great cost, unfortunately - and like the irritants, it will also allow you to red-tag the areas of the experience that absolutely must be improved. 

Note: if it is possible to establish it on the whole process, it is undoubtedly at this level that the return on investment of analysis tools, animation tools and experience and feedback measurement tools is the easiest to determine. By giving yourself the means to tackle the attrition rate and by taking corrective actions to increase customer loyalty (= limit attrition), the monthly cost of the solution becomes an investment whose profitability is no longer in doubt.

If they tell you they want to leave, it is often to tell you what the breaking point was and what triggered the attrition. Knowing this breaking point allows you to give it more importance and to characterize it as a "moment of truth" in the customer journey or, in other words, a "key success factor" in the customer experience and customer satisfaction.