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If you run a business, then you surely do your best to satisfy and please your customers, offering the best product or service. Customer reviews can help you understand if your efforts are bringing the wanted results. In today’s digital world, consumers will buy a product or service only after carefully analyzing the available reviews.
According to 68% of consumers surveyed, they are more likely to trust a business if they see positive reviews about them. Reviews are user-generated content that can do wonders for a business. Online customer reviews are a real treasure of valuable information that companies can use to grow their business and improve customer loyalty.
In this post, we’ll guide you through the process of scraping customer reviews via data extraction. And we’ll tell you how you can use that data to make data-based and knowledgeable decisions for your business.
Scraping Customer Reviews in The Business World
In this digital world, data is the king of everything. For businesses, data is a treasure that can guide you towards greater success. Online customer reviews are essentially a big database full of useful and authentic information.
Before making a purchase, people often surf the web and look for reviews based on real people’s opinions. And reviews often play a crucial role if the person ends up buying the product or service. So at first, it might seem that reviews are important to buyers only. However, that’s a wrong assumption.
Millions of reviews that consumers generate on the web daily are a great asset for businesses. So not only potential customers, but businesses too can take advantage of the reviews. Customer reviews can help businesses grow in many different ways.
Scraping Customer Reviews – The Advantage
Firstly, the business can understand what people like and dislike about their product or service. A direct response from customers helps find a competitive advantage, as well as identify the weaknesses and thereby improve them. Today businesses can track reviews not only of their products or services but those of their competitors as well. As a business, you want to always be updated on what’s happening in the market and be well-informed of your competitors.
What are their advantages over you and how you can improve? These are the most important questions that reviews can help you answer, in order to beat the competition. So tracking your and your competitors’ customer reviews offers a lot of advantages. In the rest of the post, we’ll discuss all the benefits of online reviews and explain how data extraction plays an important role in the process.
Why You Will Need Review Scraping?
Data extraction or web scraping is the process of extracting data from the web. It offers many benefits to businesses. Data scraping for competitor research and lead generation are just a few examples. It’s a great tool that you can use to excel over competitors, improve business operations, and customer service, and enhance your product or service.
Reliable data is a great asset for all companies. However, a problem usually arises when you don’t know when and how to get data. The web is currently overloaded with all kinds of data that are not always quite reliable or accurate.
People leave a review on websites every second. It’s simply unrealistic to think that you can scrape all the reviews manually. Otherwise, you’ll need to hire a team that will handle the scraping processes.
But this would be costly and extremely time-consuming. That’s why you need to find a more effective solution, such as a web scraping service. There are companies that can carry out the scraping professionally and in accordance with all your needs. There are currently many websites that carry a lot of valuable reviews, which you can scrape, analyze and use. In addition, you can also scrape social media comments and posts that carry similar information.
Turn Reviews into Actionable Data for Your Business Growth
So as we’ve mentioned, you will need reviews about both your company and your competitors. Keep in mind that a negative review is just as important as a positive one. Based on such reviews, you can understand what improvements you need, which features of your product or what aspect of your business must be enhanced. Successful entrepreneurs know this quite well.
Even if you own a small business, you’ll need to collect customer feedback. It will guide you through establishing your own unique selling proposition in the market. Now let’s discuss how exactly you can use review data.
How to Use Review Data
1) Analyze Your Business Reviews
When writing a review, many websites give the option of rating a product or service with stars. When scraping customer reviews and these star ratings, you’ll get an overall understanding of how satisfied your customers are with your brand. Customer satisfaction and loyalty are crucial factors that determine a company’s financial performance. So you most surely want to measure customer satisfaction.
After all, your main goal must be ensuring that your customers are happy and that you successfully meet their expectations. So rating-based questions can help you easily estimate how satisfactory your product or service is. But make sure that you go deeper than just scraping star ratings.
Sometimes, the overall satisfaction may be low due to factors that have nothing to do with the product itself. People might be unsatisfied because of poor packaging or delivery. Also, you want to create the best customer experience with your brand. For that, you need to encourage them to leave feedback. Providing the best customer experience at every touchpoint is what will help to create loyal customers. So make sure to check feedback regarding all the aspects of your business and not the product only.
2) Analyze Competitors’ Business Review
As we’ve mentioned, web scraping customer reviews are often used for competitor research. Extracting competitor reviews is an important aspect of competitor research. It’s a great tool that can help you understand the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. And thereby, you’ll improve your business positioning in the market.
Find out what are the main complaints of their customers and the things that they appreciate the most. Also, understand how people evaluate competitors’ product quality, service, delivery speed, and packaging. While scraping customer reviews, you’ll find out that there are a lot of dissatisfied customers with lots of complaints. This is a great advantage for you. You can track these unsatisfied customers and offer them a solution. Focus on things that people like about your competitors and make sure to improve these aspects of your business.
3) Scraping Customer Reviews to Make Comparisons
When you collect a sufficient amount of review data about your company and your competitors, this information becomes of priceless value for your company. Analyze the data and compare/contrast your business with your competitors.
You’ll get a lot of valuable insights into the future improvement of your business. Create a list of the areas that need enhancement. Such comparisons will help and guide you during decision-making. You’ll be more informed and accurate. Also, by looking into the negative reviews of your competitors, you’ll be able to find out what makes your business superior to competitors.
Scraping Customer Reviews: Popular Review Websites
For services:
Yelp – Yelp is an online reviewing platform that enables people to leave reviews on major, medium, and small businesses. It has changed the business landscape in many ways. According to 90% of Yelp users, positive reviews had somehow affected their purchase decisions.
TripAdvisor – TripAdvisor is one of the world’s largest websites for travel reviews. People from all over the world use this platform to compare different hotels based on their prices, find the best-rated sightseeing, and read reviews.
For products:
Amazon – Amazon is an online shopping giant that has beat all of its competitors. The website gives its users the ability to write reviews on all the products available on the website. As of February 2019, 58.1% of Amazon shoppers say that they trust Amazon reviews in the US. While only 4.1% stated that they don’t trust the reviews at all.
eBay – with over 168 million active buyers, eBay is an online shopping platform that offers products of different categories. It’s been the most visible online auction platform for more than two decades that sells new, used and unusual products.
The websites mentioned are simply several examples of platforms that can be scrapped for reviews. There are numerous review platforms that can be very useful for your research. Listening to customers is a great way to achieve success as they are the best testers of your brand. Leverage scraping customer reviews to always stay on top of the competition and deliver the best experience to your customers.
