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The information you need to drive revenue and increase e-commerce conversions is often sitting with your customers, if only you had a way to listen to their feedback. Well what if there was a way to get customer feedback throughout the full customer journey and get it in a way that is actionable to you and your team through dashboards and AI-powered tools?
This episode is brought to you by Bizrate Insights. Bizrate Insights helps ecommerce brands turn verified customer feedback into clear, revenue-focused action. By capturing feedback across the full shopping journey, VitalSigns reveals what customers like, where friction is emerging, and which issues may be affecting conversion. AI-powered comment summaries, real-time NPS, trend analysis, and rolling competitive benchmarks make it easier to identify patterns quickly, prioritize the right fixes, and understand how the customer experience compares over time. Learn more at bizrateinsights.com/agile
Welcome to One Amazing About Bizrate Insights. Today we’re talking with David Lynch, Exeuctive Director, Product Management at Bizrate Insights and he will be sharing one amazing thing about Bizrate Insights VitalSigns with us today.
About The Guest
David Lynch on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidvlynch/
Resources
BizRate Insights: : https://www.bizrateinsights.com/agile
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From the creators and host of the award-winning The Agile Brand™ with Greg Kihlström podcast, comes One Amazing Thing About… with Greg Kihlström, a show that puts the spotlight on the latest and greatest MarTech products and platforms by showcasing one feature that makes them… amazing.
Transcript
Greg Kihlström (00:00)
The information you need to drive revenue and increase e-commerce conversions is often sitting with your customers. If only you had a way to listen to their feedback. Well, what if there was a way to get customer feedback throughout the full customer journey and get it in a way that is actionable to you and your team through dashboards and AI powered tools?
Welcome to one amazing thing about BizRate Insights. Today we’re talking with David Lynch, Executive Director of Product Management at BizRate Insights, and he’s going to be sharing one amazing thing about their Vital Signs Insights platform with us today. David, welcome to the show.
Greg Kihlström (01:25)
Welcome to one amazing thing about BizRate Insights. Today we’re talking with David Lynch, Executive Director of Product Management at BizRate Insights, and he’s gonna be sharing one amazing thing about their vital signs. Do I say is it a product platform? Like how should I I was just gonna say because I don’t want to say Bizrate three times.
David Lynch (01:43)
it’s Yeah,
it’s I mean it’s it’s a SAS. It’s a SAS app.
Greg Kihlström (01:49)
Okay. So just like pro like platform or product or
David Lynch (01:55)
Yeah, I would say vital science is a is an insights platform.
Greg Kihlström (02:02)
Okay. But
Perfect. Okay. all right. I’ll and like I said, I’m gonna record it later, but I just want to make sure I have it right. So I just typed it there. So
David Lynch (02:13)
Yeah, sure.
Greg Kihlström (02:14)
cool. All right. So yeah, today we’re talking with David Lynch, executive director of product management at Bizrate Insights, and he’s gonna be sharing one amazing thing about their VitalSigns Insights platform with us today. David, welcome to the show.
David Lynch (02:27)
Thanks for having me, Greg.
Greg Kihlström (02:30)
Yeah, looking forward to seeing this in action in a in a minute here. But before we do, why don’t you start with giving a little background on yourself and your role at BizRate Insights?
David Lynch (02:39)
Yeah,
absolutely. So I’m the executive director of product management at BizRate Insights, and I lead two different product teams at BizRate. One that owns all of our various SaaS products, and the other we spun up about a year ago to begin building out AI features throughout our product portfolio. Over the last 15 years, I’ve worked with lots of different products ranging from SaaS in the B2B space to marketing, e-commerce, and subscription management platforms, product catalogs, and fintech in the B2C space.
Greg Kihlström (03:07)
Nice, nice, love it. So let’s let’s start by talking about you know, we’re gonna look through vital science here. T tell us a little bit about what you know, what’s what’s the product, who’s the audience, why is it important to them?
David Lynch (03:20)
Sure, yeah, absolutely. So our target audience are online retailers who want to gain valuable information from their customers before, during, and after their buying experience. Our surveys gather verified pre and post purchase insights so retailers can fine-tune their checkout experience and resolve issues before they impact revenue. We gather and track satisfaction across key touch points in real time, but you know, we need a way to share all of that information with them, right? So
VitalSigns is our SaaS product that empowers our partners to make sense of the quantifiable data that’s been gathered so that they can drive actionable outcomes.
Greg Kihlström (03:56)
Great, great. Well yeah, let’s let’s take a look here. Why don’t you share your screen and talk us through it?
David Lynch (04:01)
Sure,
you bet.
All right. So today I’m gonna demo our or show you our demo merchant Lockwood Analysis that you see in the upper left hand corner here. So we’ll begin with an executive overview, which our partners will see as soon as they log in. And instead of looking at an isolated score, the merchant can immediately see performance and context, you know, how the experience is trending with several key performance metrics. So in this example, they can see
Their net promoter score is doing well. Overall satisfaction at point of sale and post-delivery are high. We have mostly positive sentiment within the customer comments we’ve gathered. Merchants can see what the purchase frequency looks like between repeat or first-time buyers. What are the top three topics customers are talking about most?
and from this page they can click on any one of these to really drill down on any of the individual sections for more detail. And they can also navigate to the left-hand menu to drill down with more detail. So let’s take a look at site abandonment or aka pre-purchase.
All right, so non-purchasing visitors often conduct research, evaluate options, or seek inspiration, making traditional abandonment metrics misleading. Now we can hear from the people who visited but didn’t make or complete a purchase. So traditional analytics may place all of these sessions into an abandonment bucket, but these shoppers are not all doing the same thing, right? Some are window shopping, some are comparing pricing options, some intend to return later, either online or in store.
Others encountered a genuine obstacle and may visit another website next time. And that distinction matters because the right business response is different in each case, right? So here the pre-purchase overall metrics view shows us why they came to the site, why they abandoned, and whether they plan to come back while allowing you to see how they scored in traditional KPIs like overall satisfaction, but also how they graded the design of your site, how easy it was to navigate.
And whether or not you have the right selection of products. And you can drill down on folks by device, intent, or point of abandonment, or future intent, and then see, for example, how your customers graded the design of your site, which could be different between mobile and desktop. So if we drill down on customers who intended to buy and then abandoned, then see how they scored the design of your site.
We can compare device types and notice that with the exception of one or two days, which looks like a blip, folks on mobile are pretty happy with the design. But if you go to desktop, there’s been a steady decline in approval over the last 30 days. So even if the ratio of mobile and desktop is something like 70-30, there could still be an opportunity to keep folks on desktop more engaged and complete their purchase.
And they may already have an idea about what that could be based on changes they might have made to their site recently. So quantitative data like this tells us where to investigate, but for examples like this and others, we need the customer’s own words to explain why. So merchants are going to want to read what their comments are actually saying, or what customers rather are saying about their experience, right?
Greg Kihlström (07:31)
Yeah.
David Lynch (07:33)
So this is our comment summary page, and here we get a sense of the comment topics and sentiment behind them. And just like you saw on the home page, you have the comment tone summary, but now we begin to peel back layers of the onion because the overall ratio of tone doesn’t always tell the full story. Some customers may have had a seamless experience, others may have encountered friction based on how they shopped. And understanding the sentiment around key areas of the site experience, including coupons and promotions.
shipping, ease of navigation, and so on, help us to get a better understanding. If the ne if the negative sentiment for something like pricing sticks out, like a sore thumb, for example, they can drill down on that for a filtered view of the comments that drove that sentiment.
So now in this specific example, the number of comments is relatively small. But if the sample size is larger because you’ve experienced the or you’ve changed the filters or a given date range, comments can be overwhelming when there are hundreds of raw entries to sift through.
Greg Kihlström (08:36)
Right.
David Lynch (08:37)
Now, you know, like our partners told us they loved the qualitative feedback on the comments page, but they were spending hours reading through every line. And we listened to them and we built our AI insights comment summary at the top of the page to instantly
Distill raw feedback into an actionable executive summary. So here the summary services neutral observables, as well as things the merchant can improve upon and what they’re doing well. And this helps teams, you know, move from feedback overload to clear priorities without losing the customer’s voice. We take pride in our close relationships with our customers, and this feature came directly from their feedback.
They told us what to make the platform better and more useful and we built it.
Greg Kihlström (09:23)
Nice, nice.
David Lynch (09:25)
So
let’s talk about the buying experience itself though.
So now we can hear directly from the customers who completed a purchase and understand how they felt while they were making it, as well as how they felt once they received their order, so we can understand their end-to-end experience. And just like site abandonment, the overall metrics page gives merchants a clear pulse on customer satisfaction through metrics such as overall satisfaction, likelihood to recommend, or to buy again. And here we get a clear understanding of whether the experience lived up to the expectations that were set during the shopping journey.
After they received their order. So a successful checkout doesn’t always mean a successful customer experience. The order may have experienced, or rather, arrived later than expected. The product may not have matched the description. Maybe the customer experienced an issue with returning something, shipping fees might be too high, whatever it may be. On the other hand, a smooth delivery and a product that meets expectations can strengthen satisfaction, loyalty, and the likelihood of purchasing again.
And that differentiation matters because post-delivery feedback helps merchants separate website friction from fulfillment or product-related issues. And it shows whether the concern began during the shopping experience or emerged after the purchase was completed. They can also view their net promoter score. And here
They can not only break down the ratio of detractors, passives, and promoters, but they can compare that score to their industry benchmarks, which represents merchants in the same category, so they can understand how they stack up against their competition. And these benchmarks are constantly being updated in real time. So our merchants are able to get a better understanding of the current state of the market every day. And in this particular case, we’ve got lots of different benchmarks because it’s our demo merchant.
But we also have comment summary, which is available here to understand whether things like promo codes, shipping, or return policies encourage a visitor to spend more on site. Now the merchant knows whether the opportunity is to improve the overall customer experience or investigate a more specific issue, such as site performance, customer service, checkout friction, et cetera, rather than relying on aggregate scores. And just like they could for pre-purchase, they can also zero in on specific comments that drove that sentiment.
Something like 83% of the comments being negative for billing, they can drill down on that further. So when we take a step back, VitalSigns gives merchants a connected view of the entire customer journey, from understanding why someone visited but didn’t purchase to learning why buyers felt or how they felt about the shopping experience to seeing whether the product and delivery ultimately met their expectations. And at every stage, the quantitative data shows merchants where to investigate.
While
customer comments and AI-powered summaries help explain why. So one amazing thing about VitalSigns is that it turns the customer’s voice into a clear business priority. Instead of spending hours searching through dashboards and raw feedback, e-commerce teams can react and quickly identify friction, understand what customers need, and focus on the changes most likely to improve satisfaction, conversion, and revenue.
Greg Kihlström (12:48)
Nice, nice.
Love it. Yeah. I mean the you know, the thing that I’m I’m struck by is just there’s so much nuance. as you were saying, you know, from from the beginning, you’re you know, there’s there’s a lot of nuance in even cart abandonment or page abandonment that basic analytics just cannot and was never even intended to show, but you know, that that these merchants need so so badly, as
David Lynch (13:13)
Exactly.
Greg Kihlström (13:13)
well as, you know, towards the end, as you were talking about the post
purchase experience. I mean, such a critical part to, you know, we we’re measured by checkouts, right? It’s often, but what actually affects that repeat customer, there’s so much that can happen between hitting, you know, hitting the submit button and and actually getting
David Lynch (13:32)
Yep.
Greg Kihlström (13:32)
the product.
David Lynch (13:33)
Yeah. And that’s why and that’s why Google pivoted away from, you know, online purchase or the current purchase like checkout experience and then really pivoted towards post fulfillment after they received their product because they knew that that really was telling the whole picture behind the entire experience.
Greg Kihlström (13:51)
Yeah, yeah. well, this is great. great, great to see this in action and definitely, you know, I think a lot of a lot of things that as as you were saying, I’m sure retailers are they’re they’re pouring through many, many different sources trying to cobble some of these answers together and you know to be able to see all this stuff in one place. That’s great. Nice,
David Lynch (14:12)
Exactly.
Greg Kihlström (14:13)
nice. Well, so if people want to learn more and get get some more information, what’s the best way for them to do that?
David Lynch (14:20)
Yeah, they should b visit BizRateinsights dot com for more details. And if they have a chance, ask more about custom categories, custom questions, and our circle of excellence.
Greg Kihlström (14:32)
Well, again, I’d like to thank David Lynch, Executive Director of Product Management at BizRate Insights for joining the show. You can learn more about David and BizRate Insights by following the links in the show notes.
