Improving Star Ratings with Product and Consumer Insight

In today’s fast-paced and competitive retail industry, suppliers must constantly strive to stand out and attract customers. Star ratings are a crucial metric for suppliers to monitor and improve. These ratings play a key role in how retailers evaluate vendor and product category performance, as well as how consumers make buying decisions. Major retailers use star ratings to drive their risk-based programs and make informed decisions about partnerships with suppliers, closely scrutinizing categories with lower ratings.

To improve star ratings and solidify relationships with retailers, suppliers should leverage customer and product experience feedback before launching their products to market. By gathering data from sources such as online reviews, social media and product return data from retailers, suppliers can gain valuable insights into how to improve their products and customer experience.

In addition to utilizing review data, following customer experience best practices — such as providing clear and accurate product instructions and addressing common challenges like issues with user manuals — suppliers can improve customer experience and star ratings. Making these basic improvements, utilizing review data and managing online reviews can go a long way to improving products reviews, which will also strengthen partnerships with retailers.

Product and consumer insight from UL Solutions

UL Solutions Product Experience Center is at the forefront of helping suppliers gain crucial customer and product insights, allowing issues to be identified and corrected before full production and distribution. We can also help with the continuous improvement of a product over its life cycle.

Our Product Experience Center provides a proprietary star rating process based on consumer insight collected during the evaluation, giving suppliers the confidence needed to succeed in the competitive world of retail. UL Solutions enables access to direct consumer feedback, giving manufacturers time to address and improve safety risks and deficiencies before production starts. This unique service can help reduce returns and recalls, improve quality and enable speed to market by facilitating real-world consumer engagement prior to full product production.

In an industry where every star counts, suppliers who gather and incorporate customer feedback early in the product development cycle can position themselves for greater success. Contact us to learn more about working with the Product Experience Center.