Shared

Hopefully, you had a successful BFCM.

In looking back on last week and weekend, it does feel like a unique time where every part of a brand has to work together in a more intimate fashion: Marketing can’t win alone. Ops can’t save a bad promise. CX can’t polish a broken experience. It all has to fit together, and that usually happens through great planning.

One of the places, I think, that’s often overlooked for qualitative inputs to that planning is reviews, and I think that can actually pull double duty during holiday—serving both as the “social proof widget” that boosts conversions and as a data stream that basically becomes planning infrastructure.

Hear me out:

Reviews are the one artifact everyone touches: They reveal what customers expected, what they actually experienced, and how they felt about the trade-off. Unlike NPS or CSAT, they aren’t designed around an internal agenda, and the free-form nature means customers choose the topics. They’re also timestamped to a specific moment, so if you can cross-reference them with what you were doing internally at that time, you get insights around operations, product quality, and whether a customer’s expectations were met based on the advertising they saw.

That makes reviews a shared truth object.

Marketing can take the phrases people use when they’re happy and build future positioning from the language that already converts. CX can focus on the issues that appear consistently — not just the loudest edge cases — and shape better support content before the next busy cycle. Ops can look at shipping, packaging, and fulfillment misses that cut across SKUs and turn that into a prioritized list everyone recognizes as real. Product and merchandising can zero in on the “almost perfect but…” patterns that point directly to fixes with immediate revenue impact.

And, interestingly, reviews you collect from BFCM purchasers might be even more valuable, because they are—contextually—from a time when all your internal teams are the most dialed in. So, all those reviews are from when you’re performing at your best.

The opportunity, then, is to use them as inputs to planning so you can close that gap between expectation and reality—something that’s probably even more valuable than displaying them on a PDP.