SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Chatmeter, the leader in local search marketing and review management, today revealed new research proving the trustworthiness of online reviews and the impact they have on consumers’ trust in a brand. In advance of National Honesty Day (April 30th), these findings combined with the launch of Chatmeter Pulse, a sentiment analysis engine, will help businesses understand first-hand what their customers are experiencing and how they make actionable decisions on where to improve the customer experience, products, marketing messaging, and operations. By becoming familiar with the needs and wants of their customers, this will naturally increase loyalty and trust with the brand itself.
Consumers prove reviews are increasingly trustworthy and important
With National Honesty Day approaching, Chatmeter further examined if fake reviews are a real issue, or just the latest in fake news. There are plenty of headlines and even some lawsuits around fake review ramifications. However, when it comes to online reviews, Chatmeter’s latest research proves it’s not an epidemic as the majority (53%) of consumers rarely or never see a fake review. Not only are 80.7% of consumers using online reviews to influence their purchase decisions, they are more scrutinous at what constitutes an honest review, which may help or hinder trust in a company.
What’s telling from this data, are the kinds of reviews consumers believe are most trustworthy and factors which impact trust of a brand:
- Seeing Stars – The majority of respondents say a star rating of a location is the biggest contributor to trust in a particular store, with 4 stars driving the most trust (41.8%).
- Quantity and Sentiment – Next to a star rating, the quantity and sentiment of reviews represented key factors which contribute to trust in an online review of a company or store.
- Millennial Trust Issues – Respondents ages 18-34 are more trusting of a brand that has 100+ reviews, while ages 45-54 are trusting of a brand with just 1 review.
- *Just Google It* – In 2016, mobile ad spend jumped 77% to $36.6 billion; but how valuable are these ads if customers can’t find local, positively-ranked store locations? Underscoring the valuable connection between online reviews and local SEO, 51.6% of respondents report they turn to reviews on Google the most, followed by 32.3% who prefer Facebook.
“With industry concerns around fake reviews on many e-commerce sites, it’s reassuring for brands to know fake reviews are not an issue in the local search space. We have seen this affirmed in our sentiment analysis across millions of reviews, and now in our recent consumer survey. However, providing great customer experiences and getting your happy customers to share them is more important than ever,” said Collin Holmes, CEO of Chatmeter.
Chatmeter AI technology helps bring awareness of consumer reviews and action to brands
- Insights down to the location level – Most social tools provide sentiment analysis across the entire brand. Chatmeter’s ability to geotag content locally, allows operators to know what specific issues are occurring at each location/region, without reading hundreds of reviews.
- Improved sentiment accuracy – Typical sentiment accuracy is around 70-80%, however, Chatmeter’s updated technology able to detect sentiment accuracy is scoring between 80-90% accuracy. We also apply machine learning from ongoing data collected to improve accuracy over time and the engine itself gets smarter.
- Enhanced industry accuracy - Most sentiment algorithms are either open source or built for social across mentions on all brands and all industries. Chatmeter’s built in-house technology, is optimized based on each industry we serve. By doing this, we have greater accuracy for word variations based on industries. Cold for Hotels would be negative (cold shower), but cold for Restaurants would be good (cold beer).
- Topic Analysis – A thorough review may talk about the good the bad and the ugly and most sentiment tools tend to identify and measure an overall score across the entire review. With Chatmeter’s technology, it identifies a topic that may be positive in one sentence but have negative aspects in others and rolls up the scoring of all those sentiments into more accurate individual ratings.
To learn more about how businesses can improve their local SEO and better harness the power of online reviews, check out Chatmeter’s blog: https://www.chatmeter.com/blog
About Chatmeter
Chatmeter (www.chatmeter.com) helps enterprise retail brands and agencies managing multiple locations increase their revenue. Since being the first Local Reputation platform in 2009, they now analyze and improve over 1,500,000 storefronts for their reviews, rankings and listings.
They help retailers make a distinct impact in revenue by identifying several areas in their online presence that drives customers to choose their stores over competitors. Chatmeter takes this a step further with the only integrated local visibility rank tracker so you can measure ROI using the most complete local presence management platform in the world.
The benefit for the clients is complete online presence management simplified into a single dashboard. They also power a white-label reputation management dashboard for many agencies across the U.S.
Some clients include Sears, Verizon Wireless, Comcast, Aaron's, Kohl's, Bruegger's Bagels, Texas de Brazil, and Dickey's BBQ.