Digital marketing: Can AI help streamline your feedback loop?

Being diligent about interacting with your reviews is not just an integral part of your online social proof – it’s a key step in assessing your own performance. AI can help with that, says Katrina Bell.

Who would have predicted that so much of your customer service and reputation management would be conducted out in the open? But here we are. 

Around 90% of consumers read some type of review before making an online purchase, and according to Feefo, they are 97% more likely to make another purchase from a brand if their review gets a response.

Many of the social apps and review platforms are experimenting with AI-generated comments. On Insta, some users are starting to see a star next to the pencil icon, which allows users to let Bot do the talking. 

Google is also making moves to make AI ‘Guided Assistance’ a reality via its Google AgentSpace, a platform that allows retailers to create their own personalised AI customer service process.

But can an AI assistant really break through our generally held values? Most customers want brands to be personable, and human. They certainly value personalised responses to their reviews and comments and from personal experience, lose patience and confidence when replies are generic and unspecific. It’s worth remembering also that If you aren’t evangelising your brand in the comments sections, @-mentions and DMs, your social proof score will always be a letdown.

So the aim isn’t to automate all interactions, but to use AI to make yours more useful to both parties. There are several roles you can hand over to AI to free up your actually human resources to deal with more in-depth conflict resolutions.

Review platforms are already integrating AI to automate some interactions – customers are more likely to return to a brand if their review gets a response, within no more than a week, sometimes even hours if the review is negative.

These high expectations can put undue pressure on any organisation, which is where AI can step in. Review site Feefo has developed a feature called AI replies that allows users to customise responses to fit in with their company tone. The algorithm studies several elements in a matter of seconds, including customer and responder names, as well as merchant and product information. Prices start from £149 per month.

The world’s biggest review platform TrustPilot has an AI option called AI Reply Assistant, while Yell offers a similar product under its Business Services offering. Google Business Services Manager also offers AI suggested replies. Whether they are any good yet is another matter.

People will choose a product or services with more reviews rather than one with fewer. That even includes a few negative comments. Nobody trusts glowing remarks across the board. It’s just not sustainable.

However, understanding overall themes in your reviews is a job for the AI. This goes beyond sentiment analysis, which is a phrase we are going to see alot. Obviously, if you ask ChatGPT if it is good at this, the answer is yes. It typically gives itself good reviews. However both the large language learning AIs and the review platforms can speedily summarise your feedback into categories. From now on you don’t need to read through thousands of mentions, emails, DMs and reviews to get an accurate overview. Imagine you are the precis at the start of the Amazon reviews. You can access those with the very simplest of prompts.