Customer review management encompasses all the practices, tools, and methods used to collect, influence, process, analyze, and leverage customer feedback for marketing and management purposes. Its importance naturally grows in sectors where customer reviews have a significant impact on revenue, such as hospitality, tourism, services, and e-commerce. This approach applies to both reviews collected directly by the company and those posted on third-party platforms.

Regarding review collection, the primary objective is to encourage the number of reviews by using automated marketing techniques (such as email solicitations), specialized management platforms, and simpler methods (such as distributing business cards linking to review sites or direct verbal solicitations). Some may be tempted to manipulate these reviews by only contacting presumed satisfied customers or by targeting opportune moments, which sometimes raises ethical and legal questions.

Beyond biased data collection practices and fake reviews, responding to customer feedback can help revise a critical review, mitigate its impact by posting a response (if possible on certain platforms), or simply thank referring customers. Once collected, reviews can be analyzed and used for business and marketing purposes, enriching customer and product knowledge and improving service quality. To process large volumes of reviews, text mining tools using sentiment or emotion analysis can be employed.

Regarding the business and marketing use of reviews, the goal is generally to optimally integrate feedback into websites, mobile applications, and marketing communication channels. Review platforms offer modules to facilitate this integration. Feedback can also be used in communication materials.

Customer feedback management is a key aspect of marketing that is gaining increasing importance not only in the e-commerce sector but also in the broader field of marketing and sales. Optimizing customer feedback management involves not only aiming for conversion and loyalty goals but also influencing traffic acquisition strategies. The various aspects of customer feedback management include: improving feedback collection methods, actions to guide the nature of the feedback collected, initiatives to respond to feedback received, integrating reviews on the website, using feedback in online and offline communication channels, leveraging feedback as a source of information for marketing research, optimizing organic and paid search engine optimization (SEO) using customer feedback, and much more. The challenges associated with customer feedback management are explored in more detail in the dedicated marketing section.