PRODUCT 4 DEVELOPMENT INSIGHTS Review sites offer a unique opportunity to engage customers in dialogue about products and services. “Reviews give [companies] better insight into how they’re perceived and the challenges their products or services need to overcome to be relevant,” says Goldstein. For instance, she says, reviews can spotlight gaps in your feature set or your service offering. Both negative and positive reviews can guide product development. Here are two ways to take greater advantage of review sites: • Read reviews to see what users think of your latest product release, update or features. The more detail the review site asks for, the better: When users rank specific features of your product, you’ll get valuable feedback. • Reviews can also help you identify new products to develop. Is there a product or feature users repeatedly ask for? Look at your competitors’ reviews, too — are there products or features your competition doesn’t offer that you could add? Acting on customer feedback from reviews to modify or add a product shows your company is listening and makes customers feel valued — it even impresses prospects. “[Using a third-party review site] allows us to hear honest product feedback that we funnel to our product team to dissect and understand where our resources need to be allocated,” says Pecherskiy at StackAdapt. “We have used and still use simple solutions like picking up the phone and dialing our customers, [but reviews] helped us take it to the next level and give our customers a platform for more open communication of their feedback.” 6