There are many different things that businesses must pay attention to, like marketing, sales, product development, customer experience, and so on. But one of the most valuable assets a company can have is knowing what customers think about its products or services.
After all, the customer is always right. Companies are always competing to deliver their customers precisely what they want. This customer-centric approach has revolutionized business numbers and how successful companies can be.
In the past, it was challenging to gather a large amount of data that can tell companies exactly what their customers think. However, this is no longer an issue.
The Voice of the People: Reviews and Grades
The internet has introduced various business benefits. Companies are making the most of their online efforts to boost business results. Among many things, the web is a great place to learn what customers think about businesses, their brands, products, and services.
One of the best indicators of customers’ sentiments is reviews. With grades, customers can quickly indicate the level of overall satisfaction with a product. Reviews allow them to share their opinions, what they found great, and what they disliked about something.
Most people will leave reviews or grades. More importantly, everyone will read some reviews before deciding whether or not they should buy a product. Not only can other customers learn from this, but companies can improve as well, with review monitoring.
Review Monitoring as a Business Necessity
Review monitoring is an essential technique for brand monitoring. It’s the process of gathering and monitoring online conversations about a business or its products. One of the best ways to do this is by using web scraping.
This practice helps companies gather large amounts of data from review sites and put all that data in one place. Apart from monitoring customer feedback and brand mentions from different sources, it also involves analyzing the data and establishing practices to improve and maintain the brand image.
This helps companies generate better future reviews and address all of the negative ones quickly to reduce damages. At the same time, companies can learn a lot about where they can improve their service. Furthermore, web scraping also lets companies gather customer feedback about other companies anonymously.
This lets companies learn why their competitors are so successful and what they are doing right. But at the same time, they can discover their weaknesses. However, scraping is limited on its own without using proxies. Proxies are essential for this process and help overcome various challenges.
What Challenges Proxies Help Overcome
Proxies are 3rd party servers that enhance the customer review monitoring process with web scraping. The first major issue with scraping is that sites can block it. Review sites don’t want companies to extract their data.
A proxy can change the IP address of the scraper and let you gather data continuously without being blocked. Since monitoring customer reviews is an ongoing process, it’s essential to have fresh data coming in regularly. At the same time, companies often scrape their competitors’ websites.
A proxy lets you do this anonymously without anyone being able to figure out who is extracting data from their site.
This helps companies hide their intentions from their competition. Scraping and proxies also let you filter out the exact data you need with the utmost accuracy. This helps businesses get usable data that is structured, ready to be analyzed.
What Type of Proxies Work Best
There are many types of proxies out there. Not all of them are great for gathering customer reviews. Some of them are designed for personal use and simple IP address coverage. Overall, the best proxies for customer review monitoring are rotating proxies.
They allow you to send out hundreds of requests to a single website. This is very important as web crawlers go through a review site many times to gather data from different pages. They prevent blocks and let you rotate your address countless times, granting free access.
Furthermore, these proxies are built to process many requests. They are a lot faster and save money when it comes to monitoring customer reviews. These proxies also offer a high level of anonymity, making them perfect for the job.
Conclusion
Knowing what your customers think about your business at all times gives you valuable business intelligence. It helps make informed business decisions and changes to perfect your service while mitigating negative sentiments online.
All companies need to get on with the times and take full advantage of modern tools and data. Business data is the future, and soon, companies will have to have actionable information at their disposal. This is why scraping and proxies are essential in modern business.