Leveraging Consumer Insights For Effective Procurement
Consumer Insights can help you identify trends, risks, and opportunities that can inform your procurement strategy. In this article, we'll explore how fashion businesses can leverage consumer insights in making informed procurement decisions - using customer review analysis.
As a procurement professional, you are tasked with finding the best suppliers, negotiating the most favorable terms, and managing complex supply chains. It's a challenging job that requires a keen eye for detail and the ability to make informed decisions quickly.
One way to gain a competitive edge in procurement is by using customer review analysis to guide your decision-making process. By analyzing customer feedback on suppliers' products, you can identify trends, risks, and opportunities that can inform your procurement strategy.
In this article, we explore how fashion businesses can leverage consumer insights in making informed procurement decisions - using customer review analysis.
The Evolving Landscape of Modern Procurement
Due to the the fast-evolving world of modern ecommerce, the age-old reliance on gut feeling spreadsheets and negotiation skills in procurement has encountered its limitations. Procurement has transcended its conventional boundaries, driven by the demands of a digitally transformed world. It's clear that an extra dimension is needed to navigate the complexities and nuances of supplier relationships and strategic decision-making.
Gaining a competitive advantage in today's procurement landscape requires a holistic approach that goes beyond traditional methodologies. Imagine having the ability to access insights that extend beyond data-driven decisions, tapping into a wellspring of information that has the potential to redefine procurement strategies.
This is where the power of customer review analysis comes into play—a tool that holds the key to reshaping the trajectory of procurement.
Why Does Customer Review Analysis Matter?
According to a study by BrightLocal, 85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. This means that customer reviews can have a significant impact on the reputation and success of suppliers.
By harnessing the voice of customers, procurement practitioners can look into the performance of suppliers and the quality of products. This firsthand perspective goes beyond the realm of statistics and provides a genuine understanding of the user experience, which is often overlooked in conventional data-driven approaches.
Redefining Procurement Decision-Making
Customer review analysis has the transformative potential to redefine the decision-making process in procurement. It allows professionals to move beyond the realm of assumptions and forecasts, basing their decisions on real-world experiences shared by those who have interacted with suppliers and products.
Identifying Trends and Opportunities
Procurement strategies should not only be reactive but also proactive. With customer review analysis, professionals can identify emerging trends and spot opportunities that align with market demands. This information enables procurement strategies to stay ahead of the curve, enhancing a brand's agility in responding to shifting market dynamics.
Supplier Performance Evaluation
Supplier relationships are pivotal to procurement success. Customer review analysis offers an authentic lens through which to evaluate supplier performance. It goes beyond the numbers and metrics, revealing the impact of suppliers on real-world operations and user satisfaction.
Mitigating Risks through Insights
In a rapidly changing world, the ability to mitigate risks is paramount. An international survey in 2023 revealed that companies acknowledged that proper supply chain risk management planning can add up to 70% additional value to reducing costs and unnecessary expenses.
By analyzing customer feedback, procurement professionals can identify potential risks and challenges before they escalate. This proactive approach ensures that issues are addressed swiftly and effectively, safeguarding the supply chain and minimizing disruptions.
Crafting Data-Informed Strategies
The shift toward data-driven decision-making is a defining trend in modern procurement. Customer review analysis fits seamlessly into this trend, providing the data-informed insights needed to craft procurement strategies that are rooted in both quantitative data and qualitative experiences.
Building Confidence and Clarity
Confidence is the cornerstone of procurement excellence. When decisions are based on a combination of real-world experiences and solid data, professionals can approach their roles with enhanced clarity and conviction. Customer review analysis contributes to building this confidence, empowering professionals to navigate the complexities of procurement with assurance.
How To Leverage Customer Reviews
To leverage the power of customer review analysis in procurement, you need to know how to collect, and analyze customer feedback.
Sourcing
For prospective suppliers, sourcing for customer reviews starts with requesting for past and current clients, and searching their websites and online stores for products that the suppliers have provided them with. The reviews for these products will be readily available on their websites.
Procurement professionals who want to analyse customer reviews for their products, which are supplied by current suppliers, will source for them from their websites or online stores on which they sell.
With AI-powered market retail & consumer insights solutions such as Woven Insights, the process of collecting customer reviews is as easy as inputing the URLs of the products you want to analyse - or just searching for your products of interest from the 2 million+ products already being tracked on the platform.
Once you have collected customer reviews, you can categorize them as supplier or product. This will help you better understand trends and patterns in customer feedback.
Analysis
Our Consumer Insights solution leverages Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence systems to analyze customer feedback at scale. It highlights common themes, customer sentiments, or issues, which can be used to identify potential risks and opportunities based on the feedback.
Sharing these insights with relevant teams such as risk management or supplier relationship management can help make more effective and proactive procurement decisions.
Monitoring these feedback trends over time help to identify changes in supplier performance, common issues, or new opportunities for improvement. This will help businesses increase their revenues, and increase efficiency, while promoting brand loyalty.
Benefits of Leveraging Customer Review Analysis
Leveraging customer review analysis can offer a host of benefits to procurement professionals. Here are some of the key advantages:
1. Risk Management
By identifying potential risks through customer review analysis, procurement professionals can avoid costly supplier issues such as late deliveries, quality issues, or disputes.
2. Better Supplier Selection
Analyzing customer reviews can help to identify the best suppliers in terms of quality, reliability, and customer satisfaction.
3. Enhanced Supplier Negotiations
Armed with insights from customer feedback, procurement professionals can negotiate better terms and conditions with suppliers.
4. Cost Savings
By minimizing suppliers and products with negative customer feedback, procurement professionals can avoid costly supplier issues, such as product recalls, service failures, or warranty claims.
5. Improved Stakeholder Satisfaction
According to a report by Gartner, 83% of global businesses in 2023 find the development of customer-centric procurement and supply chains important to bringing their companies great reputational value. Using customer review analysis to inform procurement decisions can lead to better supplier performance and ultimately, improved stakeholder satisfaction and brand loyalty.
Conclusion
Customer review analysis can be a valuable tool for procurement professionals to make informed decisions. By analyzing customer feedback, procurement professionals can identify potential risks and opportunities, make better supplier selections, negotiate better terms and conditions, and ultimately, drive better outcomes for their organizations.
To make the most of customer review analysis, procurement professionals need the right tools, processes, and systems to gather feedback at scale, categorize and analyze it, and share insights with relevant teams. By prioritizing customer satisfaction through review analysis, procurement professionals can gain a competitive edge in a crowded marketplace, and ultimately, drive better business outcomes.
About Woven Insights
Woven Insights is an AI-powered fashion analytics software, empowering fashion retailers, merchandisers, research teams, and manufacturers with accessible actionable insights, by leveraging Artificial Intelligence.
Gone are the days when actionable fashion analytics was accessible only to larger, more financially robust fashion businesses. We are democratizing fashion intelligence with the most affordable pricing in the industry
Join the market leaders, and gain a high-level understanding of the fashion market, by leveraging insights from more than 40 million online shoppers and 2 million+ products from more than 120 of the top global fashion brands.