Analyzing Mall Visitor Sentiment from Surveys
With the retail landscape changing rapidly, it’s more important than ever for shopping malls and brick-and-mortar stores to understand the sentiment and preferences of their visitors. Analyzing visitor feedback through surveys and other channels provides great insights that mall owners and retailers can use to attract visitors, enhance their experience, and build loyalty.
Why Collecting Visitor Feedback is Crucial for Malls
There are several key reasons why mall owners should make collecting visitor sentiment data a priority:
Drive Traffic and Sales
Understanding likes, dislikes, frustrations and needs allows malls to better cater offerings to visitor preferences. This helps drive more foot traffic and increase sales for retailers.
Enhance Visitor Experience
Sentiment analysis provides concrete data around areas like navigation, amenities, atmosphere and more that impact the overall mall experience. Malls can use this information to make data-backed investments into upgrades.
Competitive Intelligence
Visitor surveys provide key competitive intelligence as visitors often compare against experiences at other retail destinations. Monitoring this gives malls insights into competitors and where gaps exist.
Build Shopper Loyalty
Closing the feedback loop with shoppers makes them feel valued. When malls act on input and sentiment data, it fosters greater loyalty and repeat visits.
Key Methods to Collect Visitor Feedback
Malls have a number of options to gather data on visitor sentiment, preferences and behavior. Common methods include:
Visitor Surveys
- On-site, online, mobile, tablet
- Can segment by visitor profile
- Flexible format – multiple choice, review ratings, open feedback
Interviews
- Mall walkthroughs with shoppers
- Focus groups
Feedback Cards
- Placed in common areas
- Short, customizable responses
Comment/Review Boards
- Public-facing boards to leave feedback
Suggestion Boxes
- Allow anonymous input
Social Media Monitoring
- Review sites, Twitter, Facebook
- May lack context
Analyzing Sentiment and Preference Data
The process for analyzing visitor survey data includes:
Data Collection
- Gather input through selected channels
- Digitize non-digital formats (comment cards etc)
Data Organization
- Tabulate ratings, multiple choice, closed feedback
- Group open feedback by theme
Sentiment Analysis
- Identify positive, negative and neutral sentiment
- Mine unstructured feedback for insights
Data Visualization
- Charts for categorical, ratings, sentiment data
- Dashboards to track metrics
Analysis and Reporting
- Identify changes over time
- Comparison across visitor segments
- Provide recommendations based on findings
Technology to Enable Mall Feedback Management
New technology solutions are available to help shopping centers manage ongoing visitor feedback at scale:
New technology solutions are emerging to help shopping centers effectively manage ongoing mall feedback management processes and visitor insights. Feedback management software provides a central platform to gather feedback across channels – including surveys, interviews, social media, and review sites. It then automates analysis and reporting for efficient mall feedback management. Features like visitor journey mapping visualize the end-to-end shopper experience to identify pain points.
Feedback Management Software
- Central platform to manage feedback collection and analysis
- Tools to visualize sentiment, preferences, journey mapping
- Integrate survey, social media, Review Sites
Text Analytics for Surveys
- Machine learning and NLP to process open-ended text
- Auto-analyzes text data for common topics and themes
- Matches themes to business metadata
Visitor Journey Mapping
- Map customer journey end-to-end
- Identify pain points and bright spots
- Results help optimize layout, wayfinding signage
Sentiment Analysis Engine
- AI-powered processing of visitor sentiment
- Auto-tagging for positivity, negativity, neutrality
- Sentiment dashboard updated in real-time
Conclusion and Key Takeaways
- Visitor feedback provides malls invaluable insights into optimizing operations, spend and layout
- A multi-channel approach allows malls to gather rich sentiment and preference data at scale
- New technology solutions help automate analysis of unstructured text and visualize results
- Closely monitoring visitor sentiment patterns allows malls to stay ahead of emerging needs
Carefully collecting and analyzing visitor survey feedback is a must for shopping centers today. This data reveals key “heartbeat metrics” that measure the overall health of a mall and provides guidance to better cater to visitors. With new innovations in feedback management technology, gathering and acting on visitor input can become an automated, data-centric capability for malls of all sizes.