12 KPIs for Customer Feedback Analysts to Prioritize in 2024

Customer feedback analysts play a critical role in helping companies understand customer needs, preferences, and pain points, and in driving strategic decisions to improve products, services, and overall business performance. They’re especially vital to helping customer experience leaders optimize their voice of the customer (VoC) program.

In this article, we will explore the pivotal role of a customer feedback analyst and delve into the 12 essential key performance indicators (KPIs) they should prioritize to optimize the customer experience. We also categorize the metrics by single-product and multiple-product analysis. Read on for more!

What A Customer Feedback Analyst Does

A customer feedback analyst is responsible for collecting, analyzing, and interpreting feedback provided by customers regarding products, services, or overall experiences with a company. Their primary role is to gather data from various sources, such as surveys, reviews, social media, and customer service interactions, and derive insights to improve customer satisfaction, product quality, and business processes.

Your organization may refer to a Customer Feedback Analyst as a Consumer Insights Manager, Ratings & Reviews Analyst, Sentiment Analysis Specialist, and more. No matter the title, they all play a pivotal role in driving customer satisfaction, retention, and revenue.

Top 10 VoC KPIs for Customer Feedback Analysts to Consider

Review analysts commonly analyze the customer feedback on a single product. Therefore, in this section, let’s take a closer look at the ten critical KPIs that you should consider for this type of analysis.

1. Review Recency

Knowing the most recent publication of reviews (and the oldest) lets customer feedback analysts understand how actively their brand is involved with customers and gauge the ongoing dynamics of customer perceptions.

2. Review Quality:

Moving beyond quantity, this KPI focuses on the qualitative aspects of reviews. Analysts assess the richness and depth of customer insights provided in reviews. A higher review quality indicates that customers are sharing meaningful, detailed feedback, offering valuable insights for strategic decision-making.

3. Star rating

While seemingly straightforward, the star rating encapsulates a wealth of information. It serves as a quick snapshot of overall customer satisfaction. Analyzing trends in star ratings unveils patterns that can guide strategic decisions. For instance, a sudden drop in star ratings might prompt a deeper investigation into recent customer experiences.

Typically, customers won’t trust a product with anything lower than 4 stars. Lower ratings require R&R analysts to delve deeper into recent customer experiences, uncovering issues that need immediate attention to safeguard the brand's overall satisfaction.

4. Sentiment index

The sentiment index is a ratio between the amount of positive and negative comments. Each review can contain several positive and negative comments/topics. The Sentiment Index provides a reference to understand if a product or brand receives overall more positive or negative comments across all the reviews and topics.

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The sentiment index is a more qualitative metric to measure the health of your product or brand, beyond the quantitative KPIs like the Number of Feedback and Average Rating. The Sentiment Index is a metric that is independent of the customers' evaluation, and it’s based instead on what they say, providing actionable insights on what to improve in case you want to increase the performance of a product/ brand.

5. Feedback count

The total amount of reviews written by customers for a product on an e-commerce platform. This includes all reviews collected for a specific product across channels and countries as defined in the scope of the project. Take the example below from Wonderflow's Wonderboard, our powerhouse VoC analytics tool. It shows a breakdown of a business' feedback by rating, with text, and total reviews analyzed.

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6. Number of total reviews collected to measure the customer experience linked to reviews

This KPI focuses on the direct impact of customer feedback on enhancing the overall customer experience. Analysts can measure the effectiveness of changes initiated based on reviews by correlating improvements with the total number of reviews collected during a specific period.

7. Number of new clients acquired after optimizing online product listing

Understanding the impact of optimized online product listings is crucial. This KPI measures the number of new clients acquired directly as a result of strategic changes made based on customer feedback. For instance, if a skincare brand enhances its product descriptions and sees a surge in new customers, this KPI validates the effectiveness of the changes.

8. Number of increases in online traffic

This KPI focuses on quantifying the impact of customer feedback on online visibility. By tracking the increase in online traffic after specific changes or responses to reviews, analysts gain insights into how customer sentiments contribute to digital footfall. The correlation between customer sentiments and digital footfall becomes evident if changes resonate with potential customers, driving increased online visibility.

9. Number of increases in search ranking

An essential metric for online visibility, this KPI measures the climb in search rankings attributed to customer reviews. For instance, if a beauty product receives positive reviews emphasizing its effectiveness, it may lead to a higher search ranking, ensuring more visibility to potential customers.

10. Things Gone Wrong (TGW)

TGW is a critical metric for improving your products and services as it considers the average number of complaints out of all reviews. Each review can contain more than one negative comment/ topic. TGW doesn’t consider the positive mentions like the Sentiment Index, but it looks only at how many negative mentions are out of the existing reviews.

The TGW answers the question: on average, how much are my customers complaining? The higher the number is, the worse (see below):

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Two Recommended VoC KPIs for Multiple Products

Another important type of analysis that customer feedback analysts, and other similar functions, conduct is comparing multiple products, such as at the brand level. At Wonderflow, we've developed a set of effective and unique KPIs for insights managers to look at essentially the bigger picture, ultimately impacting the success of their voice of the customer programs. Let's take a look at some of the KPIs for product-group analysis:

VoC Champion Share

This KPI is the percentage (%) of products with at least 4.3 stars average rating. The VoC Champion share tells you how many products are the high-performing ones (>4.3 stars) in the brand portfolio.

A brand can have an overall good rating (i.e. above 4 stars), but is it because all of its products are above 4 stars or some have a very high rating (i.e. close to 5 stars) while others are even below 4 stars? While averages are always very useful when running any type of analysis, they can often hide important details and differences between the elements we are considering.

When looking at the rating of a brand overall, customer feedback analysts need to understand if there are any products, and how many there are, which perform below expectations. A rating of 4.3 stars is considered to be the threshold that sets products apart on e-commerce platforms to have good levels of sales.

VoC Engagement

The VoC Engagement is the average number of reviews per single Product. When analyzing a group of aggregated products, looking at the total number of reviews only can be misleading since that is heavily influenced by how many products you are looking at. The VoC Engagement is a very useful metric for comparisons, in particular, when comparing different groups of products, such as brands, categories, countries, etc.

To know if the products in a group collect on average more or fewer reviews than the ones in another group, it is important to look at this metric, and not only at the total amount of feedback, to avoid the bias generated by the number of products that we are looking at.

Conclusion

KPIs customer feedback analysts can vary depending on the specific goals and objectives of the organization. However, as experts in voice of the customer analysis, we believe the 12 KPIs we shared are crucial to improving your brand's customer experience. Would you like to better understand how these metrics are being used and how impactful they are to your success? Get in touch with our VoC consultants now!

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