Unwrangle Blog

Update on 5th Nov. 24 – Amazon has blocked access to the reviews page for products for all non logged-in users making it impossible to scrape reviews from Amazon. We’re updating our API to let users pass their own cookies as a work around to this attempt from Amazon to stop users from accessing reviews for their own products.

Update on 12th Oct. 24 – Amazon has put their reviews page sorted by recent behind a paywall making it possible to scrape reviews only with sort option set to helpful.

Update: Since writing this post we have released an Amazon Reviews Scraper that takes care of pagination and retries for you and gives you direct access to the reviews as a CSV.

Update on 21st Sept. 24 – Starting today, Amazon has further reduced the page numbers until where reviews can be seen. Reviews are now visible only up to page 5.

With the increasing importance of product reviews in influencing purchase decisions, the demand for scraping reviews from online marketplaces like Amazon has surged. However, Amazon recently limited the number of reviews one can view to just 100. But what if you need more data? In this article, we’ll explore a workaround using Unwrangle.com’s Amazon Product Reviews API and how you can potentially fetch up to 500 reviews.

Why the Limitation?

Amazon has implemented a limit, restricting users from viewing beyond the 10th page of product reviews, which equates to approximately 100 reviews. This has posed a challenge for researchers, marketers, and developers who rely on comprehensive review data for their projects.

Since mid July, 2023 Amazon displays 0 reviews for all products on its website beyond page 10.

The Workaround: Exploiting Filters

While it’s true that the direct view is limited, there’s a nifty trick you can employ. Amazon allows users to filter reviews based on different criteria, such as star ratings, helpfulness, or recency. Each filter can display up to 100 reviews, providing an avenue to extract a larger dataset.

Here’s how you can utilize Unwrangle.com’s API to leverage this:

1. Choose Your Product

Identify the Amazon product for which you need reviews and obtain its URL.

2. Initialize the API Call

Make a GET request to Unwrangle’s endpoint: /api/getter/?platform="amazon_reviews"

For instance, to fetch reviews for the latest iPhone, you’d use:

curl -v -L 'https://data.unwrangle.com/api/getter/?platform=amazon_reviews&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FApple-iPhone-13-128GB-Blue%2Fdp%2FB09LNX6KQS%2F&filter_by_star=all_stars&api_key=API_KEY'

Note: Always ensure you add the -L option with curl to handle potential redirects.

3. Apply Filters

To the same product URL, apply Amazon’s review filters one by one and repeat the API call for each filter. This way, you can scrape reviews based on different star ratings, sorting them by helpfulness or recency.

Here are the query parameters you can utilize to apply filters:

filter_by_star: Specify the star rating (1-5) to filter reviews. E.g. all_stars, five_star, four_star, etc.
sort_by: Sort reviews by ‘recent’, ‘helpful’, etc.
media_type: ‘all_content’ or ‘media_reviews_only’
page: Specify the page number to navigate through paginated results.

4. Compile the Data

Aggregate the results from each API call to have a comprehensive dataset of reviews. The following JSON is exactly how the response for the above example API call looks.

{
    "success": true,
    "url": "https://www.amazon.com/Apple-iPhone-13-128GB-Blue/dp/B09LNX6KQS",
    "page": 1,
    "total_results": 2256,
    "no_of_pages": 226,
    "result_count": 10,
    "reviews": [
        {
            "id": "R3C7EMIUQ2O4UZ",
            "date": "2024-04-04",
            "author_name": "Noelia García Vicente",
            "author_url": "https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AFXNT4KDBML67PMTBJ6XWU22NI6A/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_gw_btm?ie=UTF8",
            "rating": 1,
            "review_title": "1.0 out of 5 stars\nProducto inservible",
            "review_url": "https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3C7EMIUQ2O4UZ/",
            "review_text": "He devuelto el producto porque no se puede utilizar por las condiciones en las que está. No recomiendo comprarlo reacondicionado, si no es con mejores garantías.",
            "review_imgs": [],
            "meta_data": {
                "verified_purchase": true
            },
            "location": "United States"
        },
        {
            "id": "R30LZTKM09XXY6",
            "date": "2024-04-04",
            "author_name": "Smmusa",
            "author_url": "https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AGV5SVBK7TRSYDUB6M3QKM3CFTEA/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_gw_btm?ie=UTF8",
            "rating": 1,
            "review_title": "1.0 out of 5 stars\nNot in excellent condition",
            "review_url": "https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R30LZTKM09XXY6/",
            "review_text": "Arrived with a screen problem . Not in excellent condition as advertised. Problem on-left side screen showing a pixel. Check picture.Returned it!",
            "review_imgs": [
                "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61G5wmATGHL._SL1600_.jpg"
            ],
            "meta_data": {
                "verified_purchase": true
            },
            "location": "United States"
        },
        {
            "id": "RJEMYPZ33M923",
            "date": "2024-04-03",
            "author_name": "Robert",
            "author_url": "https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AEL6WQC3QPEXYQJKDXHZ57KUUFEA/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_gw_btm?ie=UTF8",
            "rating": 5,
            "review_title": "5.0 out of 5 stars\nLooks like new",
            "review_url": "https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RJEMYPZ33M923/",
            "review_text": "This was a gift for my grand daughter. She loves it and says it works great. She's a teen, and they love their phones, so that's a really big endorsement. I would definitely recommend this vendor.",
            "review_imgs": [],
            "meta_data": {
                "verified_purchase": true
            },
            "location": "United States"
        },
        {
            "id": "RH558IZDCGKBY",
            "date": "2024-04-03",
            "author_name": "Spacecowboy",
            "author_url": "https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AEITSH74TL3S7X5UZUSJJX3J6MKQ/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_gw_btm?ie=UTF8",
            "rating": 5,
            "review_title": "5.0 out of 5 stars\nVery good product and experience",
            "review_url": "https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RH558IZDCGKBY/",
            "review_text": "I bought this as a replacement phone and it meets all my expectations. The phone is in very good condition with no visible scratches or damage, and the battery life is 98%. I would purchase a renewed phone from here in the future with no hesitation.",
            "review_imgs": [],
            "meta_data": {
                "verified_purchase": true
            },
            "location": "United States"
        },
        {
            "id": "R2SBQ9GPTVYZKV",
            "date": "2024-04-03",
            "author_name": "R. Sanchez Mx",
            "author_url": "https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AGR4W76CGZ74UFQDHFKJSJVA7KNA/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_gw_btm?ie=UTF8",
            "rating": 4,
            "review_title": "4.0 out of 5 stars\nGood but.. no charger included",
            "review_url": "https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2SBQ9GPTVYZKV/",
            "review_text": "Iphone came with 90% of battery life and no charger. Seller stated it was a mistake from Amazon which is not fare at all. All other features are in very good condition.",
            "review_imgs": [],
            "meta_data": {
                "verified_purchase": true
            },
            "location": "United States"
        },
        {
            "id": "R30YM1DVPEAQF9",
            "date": "2024-04-03",
            "author_name": "Marc Robaczynski",
            "author_url": "https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AEFZAXXV4SWCTOXQSACJIJIV7IKA/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_gw_btm?ie=UTF8",
            "rating": 2,
            "review_title": "2.0 out of 5 stars\nPoor battery life for \"excellent condition\" iphone 13",
            "review_url": "https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R30YM1DVPEAQF9/",
            "review_text": "I received the iphone 13 in nice shape, but its battery life is only 81% which is low considering the price point of this phone versus other sellers.  I'd expect this battery life to be closer to 85-88%.  I will be returning.",
            "review_imgs": [],
            "meta_data": {
                "verified_purchase": true
            },
            "location": "United States"
        },
        {
            "id": "R1SRZIKWUZKU9L",
            "date": "2024-04-03",
            "author_name": "Lt.",
            "author_url": "https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AGW3PJ4GILLV4WF3SG3YZYCBRQZA/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_gw_btm?ie=UTF8",
            "rating": 5,
            "review_title": "5.0 out of 5 stars\nMuch cheaper alternative to the I phonec15",
            "review_url": "https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1SRZIKWUZKU9L/",
            "review_text": "Truth be told, I have a fellow Veteran that needed a newer phone. He wanted to buy the newest I Phone and just about fell over from the price. So we found this refurbished I Phone on Amazon, ordered it and a case and well thats all she wrote! Happy",
            "review_imgs": [],
            "meta_data": {
                "verified_purchase": true
            },
            "location": "United States"
        },
        {
            "id": "R2LVEKPMHOAZIX",
            "date": "2024-04-03",
            "author_name": "Dez",
            "author_url": "https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AEW5TBMA4GVKNT4PLJ4SA5JNV2AA/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_gw_btm?ie=UTF8",
            "rating": 1,
            "review_title": "1.0 out of 5 stars\nScreen was unresponsive",
            "review_url": "https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2LVEKPMHOAZIX/",
            "review_text": "Received in visually good condition. But the screen was unresponsive around all edges.",
            "review_imgs": [],
            "meta_data": {
                "verified_purchase": true
            },
            "location": "United States"
        },
        {
            "id": "R3IFECR4MZBHIB",
            "date": "2024-04-02",
            "author_name": "JM28",
            "author_url": "https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AENPWUBU5N3RI5AVSAGWGPLTJPGQ/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_gw_btm?ie=UTF8",
            "rating": 3,
            "review_title": "3.0 out of 5 stars\nGood",
            "review_url": "https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3IFECR4MZBHIB/",
            "review_text": "The phone overall was in great condition the outer part of the camera lens was a little scratched up. But the screen was fine just one light scratch but great. Although the battery was not great as it didn’t seem to last that long as I expected and charging it would take too long compared to my last phone.",
            "review_imgs": [],
            "meta_data": {
                "verified_purchase": true
            },
            "location": "United States"
        },
        {
            "id": "R13C41VHGP3Y7Z",
            "date": "2024-04-02",
            "author_name": "Melissa",
            "author_url": "https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AFDN3QBZILFQTRJOTPFRQJAOANZQ/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_gw_btm?ie=UTF8",
            "rating": 5,
            "review_title": "5.0 out of 5 stars\nWorks great",
            "review_url": "https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R13C41VHGP3Y7Z/",
            "review_text": "I purchased this for my daughter. She loves it. Works perfectly!",
            "review_imgs": [],
            "meta_data": {
                "verified_purchase": true
            },
            "location": "United States"
        }
    ],
    "meta_data": {
        "total_ratings": 7104,
        "rating_distribution": {
            "5 star": "68%",
            "4 star": "13%",
            "3 star": "5%",
            "2 star": "3%",
            "1 star": "11%"
        }
    },
    "remaining_credits": 614630
}

In Conclusion

While Amazon’s new limitation might seem restrictive, with the right tools and methods, you can still access a rich dataset of reviews. Unwrangle.com’s Amazon Product Reviews API is a powerful ally in this quest, turning challenges into opportunities for richer data extraction.

Posted on July 31, 2022Updated on July 10, 2024

Legal, Web Scraping

Can you scrape Yelp?

By Raunaq Singh

What does Yelp say?

Can you scrape Yelp? A cursory look at the Google search results for this query might have you believe that you cannot. This is because the first result that pops up is Yelp’s support page, and it clearly deters any scraping enthusiasts with a straight forward, “No, Yelp does not allow any scraping of the site….”.

Well, I would have been satisfied with this answer, only if it really answered the question we’re asking here. Whether Yelp “allows” us to scrape their site or not doesn’t really matter. Scraping public information remains a fundamental right of every internet user.

The answer to that is a straight forward, “Yes, with some persistence you can”. Go ahead and paste the following command on your terminal, what response do you see?

curl https://www.yelp.com/biz/crowne-plaza-hy36-midtown-manhattan-new-york

You should most likely see a huge blob of HTML on your terminal’s standard output. If you see this, that means you did just in fact scrape Yelp—well, kind off.

Why (and why not) scrape Yelp?

Here are a few good uses to extract data from Yelp. These range from academics to enhancing your customer experience.

Tracking the performance and customer reviews of businesses and try to get insights on different business categories.
To analyze reviews using machine learning models in an attempt to understanding the customers’ language and get insights about various aspects of their experience.
Verifying the authenticity and estimating the performance of a business in an automated manner. This could be very useful to the credit and insurance industry.
To add Yelp reviews to your internal dashboards for monitoring and marketing purposes.

Since we’re listing some good reasons to scrape Yelp, even though they do not “allow” it. We do think that the following are BAD reasons to scrape Yelp and we do not endorse these applications.

Blackhat SEO websites – copying and publishing Yelp reviews to your own ghost website without attribution.
Request Yelp’s servers at an unreasonably high rate. To avoid this, maintain healthy rate limit.
Increase impressions on advertisements artificially with conflicting interest.

How to scrape Yelp?

For developers

If you’re a developer and have experience with Python, I would recommend jumping right into to BeautifulSoup. And if you prefer JavaScript, cheerio is worth a look. These libraries make it easy to select the elements you are looking for—using different HTML document selectors, like classes, or other attributes.

Your scraper will request the HTML page in an automated way and select the elements you’re looking for. You can then run a loop over the URLs you wish to scrape and store the data in the format your desire. This should work at a small scale, but soon, Yelp will notice that there’s something fishy about your requests and you will see a page telling you that you’re not allowed to visit Yelp anymore.

What must you do then? Using a tool designed to do this is the quickest way, unless you’re experienced with rotating web proxies and the stack that’s required to bypass modern anti-bot systems—in which case you would probably not be reading this post in the first place.

For non-developers

Using an existing tool that does this for you is the most cost effective solution to this problem. It’s not uncommon for experienced developers to also use a tool rather than investing their own time to manually write and maintain a parser for Yelp.

This is where we step in. Unwrangle offers multiple solutions to extract data from Yelp. The Yelp Reviews Scraper lets you scrape all the reviews for any business listing on Yelp. The Yelp Search API lets you extract data from Yelp’s search results pages with a simple get request. The inputs required are similar to when we’re browsing Yelp manually. The Yelp Reviews Scraper requires a listing url and it makes all the reviews available as a CSV or JSON. The Yelp Search API requires a keyword, location and page number and it responds with the results in JSON format .

The Yelp Reviews Scraper can be used with our no code application. You can sign up here to get a free trial and get started with getting business reviews from Yelp with a few clicks.

As an example, here’s a link to a dataset with more than 20,000 reviews from popular hotels in Las Vegas that we created with our own API.

Our service will let you scrape millions of reviews from Yelp, Google Maps and other websites without worrying about anit-bot systems. We want to make it easier for you to uncover insights from your customer’s feedback. If you have any questions, please write to us at support@unwrangle.com.

Posted on July 15, 2021Updated on July 23, 2024

Datasets, E-Commerce Data

How To Use Ratings Data to Find Product Trends on Amazon

By Raunaq Singh

Available Data

It’s not simple to estimate how much a product sells on Amazon. Unlike AliExpress, unfortunately Amazon does not disclose the number of orders for the products available on their marketplace.

Still, we can try to extrapolate the popularity of a product using the number of ratings it receives.

Let’s assume that a product with 5000 ratings sells more than a product with 1000 ratings.

But what if you want to dig further? What if you want to know sales trend of a product? Whether it’s sales are going up or down? And how it compares with other products in its category?

Well, roughly 0.5% to 1% of sales result in a review. So we can use the number of reviews a product receives as a proxy for how much it is selling.

Extrapolate Sales Trend

And the frequency with which a product receives reviews can give us an indicative sales trend.
We scraped online reviews of a few of the most popular wireless earbuds. And here’s a plot of the number of reviews received by these products per month:

The above plot was made using about 5,000 most recent reviews of the following products: Apple Watch 6, Apple Watch SE, Fitbit Versa 2, Fitbit Versa 3, and Samsung Galaxy Active 2. We used each review’s publishing date to count the number of reviews the products received per month. The dataset used is available for download at the bottom of this post.

The above plot uses about 5,000 most recent reviews of the following products: Apple, Bose, Samsung, Jabra, and Powerbeats. We used each review’s publishing date to count the number of reviews the products received per month.

What We Learn

We can make the following observations using this plot:

Smartwatch sales are on the rise. The curve is going upwards even for the oldest product, i.e. Samsung Galaxy Active 2.
The launch of newer products affects their sales trend. Sales for Fitbit Versa 2 seem to have been affected by Fitbit Versa 3.
The more expensive Apple Watch 6 is more popular than the Apple Watch SE. They both were available first on 15th September, 2020.

Let’s take a couple of more examples of monthly review count vs. time. This time for popular body wash products ranging between $10 and $20. Here are links to each of the products featured: Tea Tree, CeraVe, Dove, Everyone, Puracy and Remedy.

Here’s another plot with review counts for the following toilet paper products: Charmin, Cottonelle, Quilted, 7th Gen and Presto.

From the above plot, we learn that:

There is a larger pattern here which is likely dependent on promotions and ad spend on Amazon
Toilet paper sales were likely higher than average for a year after the Covid 19 pandemic began to spread.
From the difference in the review counts pre month, we learn that online sales for these FMCG goods is likely lower than sales for consumer electronics.

Further Possibilities

We’ve only scratched the surface. With reviews and ratings data, one can learn a lot about brands and their audiences:

Sales trend
Customer sentiment
Competitive performance

If you suspect that some products might have a lot of fake reviews, you can choose to only plot the 1-3 star reviews since they might be a truer indicator of sale volume.

Extracting Relevant Data

How can you get ratings & review data for a category of your interest? We used our online reviews API to generate the datasets used for the above analysis.

You can get ratings and review data by scraping the web since this data is public.

Unwrangle offers real-time data apis that help scrape data from amazon or scrape reviews from yelp quickly and reliably. View entire list of scraping APIs.

Along with reviews, our e-commerce Data Feeds also include pricing information and other useful meta data.

Resources & Sample Datasets

We would like to share the resources we used to write this blog post. Here’s a link to the script used to plot the above graphs. It generates the review count vs. month plot using the response files generated by using our Online Reviews API.

The online reviews datasets used by us are available for download at the bottom of this page.

Lastly, if you want to find trends on Amazon and other e-commerce sites to help your brand succeed. Sign up for a free trial of Unwrangle and extract up to 10,000 online reviews for free. Use the script linked above to learn about the trends of different products.

We also have a new API product that can extract each reviewer’s past purchases, contact us to learn how to use it (documentation is coming soon). You can learn a lot about your target audience using public data. And it’s our mission to make this public data accessible.

Download Dataset

Posted on April 23, 2021Updated on August 16, 2024

Data Science, Datasets

Hotel Reviews Dataset from Yelp

By Raunaq Singh

Free hotel reviews dataset with 20k+ customer reviews for 5 star hotels in Las Vegas sourced from Yelp.com. Download link is at the bottom of this page.

If you need to scrape search results and reviews from Yelp, check out our Yelp Reviews API or Yelp Reviews Scraper. They support real-time extraction for reviews data from yelp in a quick and reliable manner. The API is used for real-time page wise scraping and the scraper can be used to fetch all reviews for a listing at once.

The sample dataset can be found at the bottom of this post. The dataset consists of more than 20k reviews. Starting from the first few reviews, including all reviews up until 22nd April, 2021.

For all you data scientists and research enthusiasts out there, we hope that this freshly collected dataset could give you a little kickstart with your research project.

The fields available in this reviews dataset are shown in the screenshot below.

dataset schema — Sample Review Object Schema

This dataset can be used for the following applications and more:

Analyzing trends
Just as an example, you can see estimate how room occupancy must have been affected by the Covid 19 pandemic.
Sentiment Analysis / Opinion Mining
Using NLP techniques one can find out what the average user’s sentiment is towards each of the featured hotels in this dataset.
Topic / Aspect Extraction
Using categorization techniques one can quickly figure out how each of the hotels featured in this dataset fairs on attributes such as room quality, staff, food, check-in process, etc.
Competitor Analysis
If you would like to find out what customers think about your competitors, a tailored dataset like the one featured in this blog post can enable you to do so with simple data analysis or visualization techniques.

Use the link below to download our free hotel reviews dataset for your research*

Download Dataset

If you want a sneak-peak, a truncated version (with 500 reviews) of the dataset is also available on Kaggle.

If you’re interested in generating tailored datasets like the one featured in this post on-demand with an API call, you can book a meeting with me here.

*Please note that the download link takes a few seconds to load and requires an email address where the dataset will be sent immediately. Your email address would be stored in Paddle.com’s servers (who is GDPR compliant). We will only send you a single email introducing you to our service at max and will not SPAM you at all.

Posted on April 4, 2021Updated on July 28, 2022

Customer Reviews

7 Tips to Help You Respond to Bad Reviews

By Raunaq Singh

“I will never shop there again! I’ve waited more than 5 weeks for my delivery and the customer service is totally incompetent!”
Unhappy customer

True or not: If your company receives online reviews like these, it’s not only embarrassing. One or two stars on Yelp, Tripadvisor or Google put customers off in the long term. They are bad for your business’ public image. If these comments pile up, it will even affect your bottom line at some point.

How can I react correctly to a negative review – or should I even have it deleted immediately?

Beware that the Internet is an important, maybe even THE most important acquisition opportunity for you. So good reviews from satisfied customers are a great advertisement for you and your company. Still, a bad review is not the end of the world. You yourself decide through your response how customer-oriented and professional your perception is. Bad customer experiences can even help your company to achieve an authentic external image by signaling a high level of service readiness through your fast and solution-oriented reaction. Everyone makes mistakes – and honestly admitting them is a pleasant surprise for the customer.

Incidentally, having a few bad reviews give a company more credibility than having only positive ones. Because solely positive comments could give the impression that the owner himself wrote or commissioned comments that were praiseworthy.

So refrain from wanting to prematurely delete bad reviews. A really angry customer then finds other channels to vent their frustration out. And he might even share his negative experience through these channels. This then becomes embarrassing for the external reputation of your company. And it could also scare off potential new customers.

The following tips can help you answer:

1) Fast response

Reacting to a 3 week old review seems very unprofessional. To prevent this, you have to instruct employees to check rating portals and social media channels for new ratings. Every. Single. Day. Or, much more efficient and reliable – use reputation management software like Unwrangle for being updated on your online reviews.

2) Take customer criticism seriously

First of all, assume that your customer is not a “bad” person and does not want to harm you. He only describes his personal perception and bad experience. In fact, a customer who is taking time out to write honest feedback is doing you a favor. By keeping this in mind, you can prevent impulsive responses and remain composed.

3) Always stay friendly

Answer factually. And always be friendly. This will show your customers that you care about them and are responsive to their feedback. An unfriendly response would be perceived as abusive and could permanently damage your company’s reputation. A good start would be to say thank you very much for pointing this out. Always remember that your comment is publicly visible to all other potential customers.

4) Short and sweet

Never write long justifications as to why everything went exactly the way it did on that day. Because that would just sound like excuses. Your customers will feel like they are not being taken seriously. And if your answer is too long, most users will not even read it. Instead, you should redirect the dissatisfied buyer in a friendly manner to private communication channels. This way the external effect would be less. Please note that your answer can still be visible to everyone – if the extremely angry customer should post personal mails online.

5) Offer a solution to the problem

The aim should be to fix the problem. Perhaps you cannot follow the assessment yourself or the effort to rectify it is not appropriate. Nevertheless, it is important to approach your customers and sympathize with them. If treated fairly, the annoyed person sitting on the other side could be more accommodating with your company.

6) No mass processing with standard reply

Nothing is more annoying than seeing the same response under each negative rating. You do not want to weaken your image with the copy & paste method. Cookie cutter replies make customers feel like their criticism is not being taken seriously. Giving potential customers the impression that the company doesn’t care about them. It is better, however, to use personalized formulations and respond to each bad evaluation individually.

7) Admit mistakes, apologize for inconvenience

According to a study by economists from the Universities of Bonn and Nottingham, 45% of all disgruntled customers lifted their criticism after a personal apology. If there were errors in the process, you must of course admit them. But nothing more. If you otherwise disagree as a company, you should describe it in an equally friendly manner.

A rating example from a disappointed visitor:

“The food was really bad. How can you call yourself a cook when you can’t even use spices? Everything there just tasted totally bland, never again!! “
Another dissatisfied visitor

So here we have a dissatisfied restaurant guest describing a specific service. It is important that you do not want to give the impression that your cook would prepare food without spices in your restaurant. So one possible reply would be:

“We are really sorry that you were not satisfied with our performance. Thank you very much for the specific points of criticism. We will immediately look into it and improve our offer. We would be happy if you gave our kitchen a second chance. It is important for us to convince you of the quality of our dishes. Our chefs are happy to prepare your order according to your wishes. To do this, give the waitress a brief note about your spice preferences. So that we can take your instructions or allergies into account during preparation. “
Responsible manager

If you run a practice and a patient gives unspecific and destructive feedback to your practice – you respond in a friendly manner and respond to the patient’s needs. Also try to direct the further contact to a private channel. One possible answer would be:

“We are very sorry that you are disappointed in us. We would like to find a solution and improve. So we would be happy if you could tell us what exactly bothered you during your visit. Please use our contact form on the website. Thank you very much in advance. “
A patient practitioner

As you can see, it’s not that difficult to adequately respond to the comments of dissatisfied customers. The most important thing here is to keep your own composure and of course: to keep an appropriately short reaction time for your response.

Posted on September 4, 2020Updated on April 4, 2021

Customer Experience

Why Customer Satisfaction Is More Important Than Ever Before?

By Raunaq Singh

Customer satisfaction is a contruct in which the subjective expectations of the customer are compared with their actual experience after making a purchase.

What are the factors that influence customer satisfaction and what measures can a company take to adapt its offering to better match the needs of the customer. To find that out, we go on a search for traces on the big issue of customer satisfaction.

Every customer has individual expectations, wishes and demands for their purchase as well as for their provider. Let’s call the sum of these expectations ‘the target state’. The customer subconsciously compares this with the actual state of the experience, i.e. the comprehensive performance of the product provider as perceived by them. There are different ways this comparison can turn out. If the actual and target states are close, the customer is usually satisfied. On the other hand if they are far apart, the customer is either disappointed with the experience or in the better case: they get an unexpected WOW experience.

If everything meets our expectations, we are satisfied. When the experience exceeds our expectations however, the possibe effect is much greater. Such a pleasantly surprised customer will buy from us again and again and even recommend our product to their acquaintances. Every business should aim to exceed their buyer’s expectations. This will lead to customer loyalty, or better still, creation of brand evangelists. Trying to deliver a wow customer experience goes a long way in building a following for your brand.

Never before has high customer satisfaction been more important than in today’s digital age. Where every potential guest or buyer can get an idea of the expected performance before visiting your store even once.

Did you know that 90% of all customers consult online reviews to make a purchase decision before buying a product?

A very satisfied customer will likely come back to your business and become a regular customer. Repeat customers are demonstrably more likely to pay higher prices, make their shopping carts fuller and even shop spontaneously.

In the best of cases, some customers publicly express their satisfaction on rating portals. There is no advertising as authentic and unadulterated as such reviews for a company. These free endorsements are more effective than paid ads, and do not deduct anything from your advertisement budget.

A dissatisfied customer could migrate to competition as an unvoiced complainer. In worse cases, however, he shares his dissatisfaction before that as mouth to mouth propaganda with other potential customers. In this way, our dissatisfied customer makes himself heard about his frustration, about the subjectively inappropriate product behavior or a lack of its quality.

The worst case for us as an entrepreneur would be for their bad experience to become a widely shared review and grab attention of prospects. This is where quick and flexible action counts; this is the only way to reduce the negative perception created from the documented bad experience.

A personalised response to a dissatisfied customer’s review conveys that your company cares about improving its customer experience. This course of action will have a positive effect on buying decisions of potential customers and hence also on the financial wellbeing of your company.