Five Steps To Completing A product Review
Just like a lot of firms right now, our clients are battling with their Product Reviews. Feel familiar?
It’s only natural, the reviews are new to us, so it takes some time to understand how to set them out and fully comprehend their content. Our advice?
A simple five step guide to completing your reviews.
STEP 1: Know your target market
The starting point is to document the target market for your product or service. This means identifying the characteristics of customers in your target market. If you are a sub-prime lender, for example, your target market would be customers with low income and minimal savings and in need of finance. The characteristics of such a target market could be lower levels of education, financial understanding, lower reading age and typically lower engagement with financial services. These are examples of characteristics but firms may also include aspects such as a customer being time poor/rich. This allows you to place your customer based into ‘groups’.
RELATED ARTICLES:
RELATED RESOURCES:
STEP 2: Identify the objectives of your customers
What is it your customers are looking for? Once you identify this, you can identify whether different groups of customers manage to achieve this objective. If you have a specific group that is not achieving their objectives, then you know you need to take some action. A similar process can be taken with value assessments where you identify if a group of customers usually pay more for the same service or utilise the service less and therefore receive a reduced service at the same price. The work you undertake for your value assessment can inform this section of your product review.
STEP 3: Identify the nature and quality of the benefits of your product
Here, the focus is on the quality of your service. A range of MI can be used to measure where service levels, specifically customer support, can be improved.
STEP 4: Document
Firms will then need to document their reviews, ensuring they cover:
If the product is in each group’s best interests
The outcome of the first three steps
Actions to be taken.
STEP 5: Monitor and Review
As with everything in compliance, product reviews should be an iterative process, one where significant improvements are made in the first instance but those improvements must be monitored as part of your consumer duty governance reporting to ensure effectiveness.
The keyword to keep in mind while you undertake your product reviews is ‘challenge’. You should be asking questions as part of your review which challenge the characteristics of your product, nature of your service, support options and chosen methods of communication. Those challenging questions are good - these reviews are not supposed to be a tick box exercise where you demonstrate only the strengths of your product. They should also demonstrate and improve on the weaknesses.
We recommend you employ external appraisal of your product reviews; such an appraisal can add additional challenge, identify where you have not asked yourself tough enough questions, and -crucially - benchmark against others in your sector and the wider industry.
This is where we would like to offer you support. Firstly, our template Product Review can be located here.
The review is designed to be moulded for your firm, so keep in mind it is a starting point only. Then we would like to offer to engage with you to provide that review of your product reviews. If you are interested please contact us: Robert.bell@rbcompliance.co.uk
Comments