Smart Companies Now Use Online Reviews To Dictate Product Development

In the past, if a company wanted to develop a new product, it would get its best marketing experts and engineers in a room and have them thrash it out. Eventually, a new set of ideas, refinements, and improvements would emerge, and development would begin.

With the rise of online reviews, though, many firms are looking at the possibility of using customer feedback directly. Simply harnessing online reviews could provide all the data that businesses need to make the right product development choices.

But there’s a problem with this approach: customer reviews are fallible. The challenge for many firms is that their audiences often don’t understand the technical or economic difficulties involved in providing them with the services that they demand. While it might seem trivial to add features, that is rarely the case in practice.

Companies face another challenge: analyzing the data. Firms that sell a lot of different products can experience review “cannibalization,” where reviews are spread thinly across the entire range. When this happens, it is more difficult to apply standard big data techniques, and results lose their precision.

Is your business interested in using online reviews to plot its product development trajectory? If so, then be sure to take a look at the following infographic. It delves into some of the nitty-gritty technical details of using reviews and providing much-needed insights. It then teaches you about the relationship between customer agility and product performance. In short, using online reviews effectively could help make your company a lot stronger.


Infographic by University of Alabama Birmingham

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