What Are Amazon Feedback & Review Management Tools?

Managing customer feedback and inquiries is critical to your daily Amazon workflow. As your Amazon business grows, the amount of resources needed to keep on top of review management will increase. In this article, we take a look at the value of Amazon feedback and review management tools that can help you to streamline your Amazon customer feedback and relations from one place, improving your chances of conversion and customer satisfaction.

What Are Amazon Review Management Tools?

An Amazon review management tool is a software solution that Amazon sellers and vendors can use to automate processes around monitoring, reporting, and responding to customer feedback. Different Amazon feedback tools will have different capabilities, but useful features may include:

• Live alerts, such as email notifications, on new product reviews,

• Ability to create custom filters, sorting options and views of your reviews,

• Customizable responses,

• Analytics and insights that provide insight into the drivers of customer satisfaction.

The needs of individual sellers may differ depending on the size and range of their product portfolio, but creating insights and automating manual processes are advantages that even the smallest sellers can benefit from.

Why is Amazon Feedback Important?

Before addressing the advantages of Amazon feedback management tools, we should briefly explain why reviews are such an important topic for Amazon sellers. Customer feedback is an integral part of the Amazon shopping process, as it provides valuable information for both Amazon, when deciding how to rank products, and for prospective customers, when deciding whether to make a purchase. And for sellers themselves, customer feedback is the number one source of information for how satisfied people are with your products.

How Does Amazon Use Customer Feedback?

Customer feedback on your ASINs generates two metrics that Amazon's algorithm can use when determining the ranking of products: the number of reviews and the review score. Additionally, the absolute number of reviews can also be analyzed in relation to the number of products sold, providing Amazon with a percentage of sales that lead to customer feedback.

Very simply, more reviews and better review scores are positive signals that will increase the likelihood of your ASINs moving up the organic rankings. 

How Do Amazon Customers Use Reviews?

Customer feedback is extremely prominent on Amazon, with shoppers seeing the number of reviews and the average score in the organic search results, and in many different ad types, including Sponsored Products and Sponsored Display ads. This information contributes to a shopper's decision on whether to click on a listing. Considering metrics, review score is therefore a factor in a strong click-through rate (for both paid and unpaid listings).

Customer interaction with reviews doesn't end after clicking on a listing. Depending on the nature of the purchase (price point, category, product type), shoppers will often read through several reviews on the product detail page to try and better understand if the product is right for them. They may also compare reviews of different products before choosing which one to buy. In this way, Amazon customers are using both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of reviews.

How Can Amazon Sellers Use Customer Feedback?

For Amazon sellers, customer feedback shouldn't just be seen as another task to be managed. Feedback is a gift. Understanding what your customers like (or dislike) about your products can help you in the following ways:

• you can ensure the information on your product detail pages is clear and customers understand what they are purchasing,

• you can identify customer painpoints and use these to help shape future product decisions,

• you can measure the impact of any changes you do make, and see if results match up with expectations. 

Furthermore, customer feedback is your opportunity to have a conversation with your audience. A well-managed Amazon business communicates regularly and drives satisfaction for its customers. From offering timely responses to customers’ concerns to focusing on improving overall customer experience, it’s crucial to regularly manage your customer relations on Amazon.

“Our research shows that orders with messages responded to within 24 hours receive 50% less negative feedback compared to orders with messages responded to after more than 24 hours.”Amazon Buyer-Seller Messaging Service

Using Amazon Feedback Management Tools

Anyone generating more than a handful of sales on Amazon will quickly realize that keeping tabs on incoming customer feedback can require a significant amount of resources. Feedback management tools are a great way of making sure you are covering all the areas of customer interaction on Amazon.

If used effectively, a review management tool can ensure that you create and maintain a well-managed customer-first reputation, also helping to attract future potential customers, encouraging organic visibility and ultimately helping you to drive new sales.

Here, we'll look at a few common features of Amazon feedback management tools, and explain what benefits they bring for your business.

Review alerts

If you have a tool that means you receive instant notifications about every new product review, then you can immediately respond. Negative reviews can have a negative impact on your sales, and sellers should react as quickly as possible to reduce the damage of negative feedback. With an automation software, you can stop manually searching across your products for reviews and start receiving updates whenever a new review is posted. Users of feedback management tools are better positioned to stay in control of their reputation on Amazon by reacting to reviews – positive and negative – instead of wasting time searching for them.

Depending on how many reviews you receive, you may wish to filter alerts to prioritize reviews with low scores, or integrate your alerts with other internal ticketing systems. The level of sophistication required will depend on your situation, but the value of being automatically alerted to new reviews, and being able to take immediate action no matter how large or small your product portfolio, is beyond question.

Custom filters

Whether you manage 100 or 10,000 ASINs, it is important to organize and sort your reviews and questions, identifying where to start based on what matters most to your business. A good review management tool should allow you to filter reviews by attributes such as tag, brand, product category, marketplace, and star count. This will help you to prioritize your daily workflow and efficiently manage your reviews to increase customer satisfaction.

Customizable responses

For a customer with a legitimate question or complete, receiving a reply that is obviously a standardized template response can be a frustrating experience. In some cases, this could even be worse than receiving no response at all. Amazon feedback management tools make it possible to offer customized responses to all your customer feedback—at scale—instead of templated responses.

By customizing your responses, you show your customers how interested you are in their unique needs and feedback. This creates a much better impression than using pre-templated emails with generic language—this is you talking directly to your customers. Additional features of response management tools may include the ability to flag conversations for notifications and alerts when an existing review is updated or revised.

Feedback analytics

Effectively capturing data from reviews is a prerequisite for conducting feedback analytics. This can range from a high-level overview of feedback status and trends across all your products to a deeper dive into the data for specific ASINs. Analytics dashboards can aggregate and track reviews at brand, category, marketplace or other levels, and provide valuable insights for your product managers.

Some feedback management tools will let you create dashboards directly, whilst for integration with other data sources, you may look for export options. Detailed information, such as your full history of reviews and questions, can also be analyzed for use in content creation, advertising and marketing initiatives, or to review product quality and management.

Learn How to Get More Amazon Customer Reviews

An Amazon feedback and review management tool is a great way of monitoring and responding to reviews that come in. But what if you're struggling to get a meaningful number of product reviews? This can be a real challenge for sellers and is a whole topic for itself. To get you started, you might want to investigate the possibilities offered by the Amazon Vine program.