I work as a Marketing Analyst at Bazaarvoice, and I can tell you from experience that product reviews will surface more than just product description insights. Some consumers are very active when given a free text field such as a product review, and we have found that an average 3 percent of our reviews contain questions. Some questions are rhetorical, but many are real customer questions for which they are hoping to find answers.

More importantly, reviews containing questions have an average 17% lower product rating and 18% lower net promoter score, so retailers are losing and frustrating customers by not addressing these queries.

Surely, it would be better as an exit pop-up, pop-over, pop by for a cup of tea.

However, there is one small glitch- for most visitors, the survey window pops up too early. And though the instructions clearly say that the visitor can take the survey at the end, visitors don’t seem to be reading them. They assume they are supposed to take the survey right away and we get comments such as “How do I say anything about your website without surfing it?”:)Anyone having the same problem?

To Mark, the best way to see whether it would impact customer behavior would be to test it for a sub-group of customers coming to your site. You may be surprised by what you see.

I’d be interested in hearing how and where people are using 4Q

And why does this oftentimes happen?

Because marketers, always pressured by time/resources/budget, end up relying too heavily on technology and not enough on gaining customer insight. Technology is great for a lot of marketing tasks, but it will never answer the all-important customer insight questions, like “Why didn’t visitor A convert?”