Episode Summary
In this episode of Seven Figures and Beyond, Greg Shuey explores how to use AI to analyze customer feedback and turn it into actionable insights that drive growth. Building on the previous episode about collecting customer feedback on a budget, he explains that gathering feedback is easy, but interpreting it is where the real value lies. Greg highlights how AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and FormWise can process large datasets such as reviews, surveys, and chat logs to uncover patterns humans often miss due to bias or fatigue.
He shares practical ways to cluster responses by themes like price, quality, shipping, and trust, extract customer quotes for use in ads and content, and even automate the analysis process using tools like Tally, Zapier, and OpenAI. The episode identifies four core insight types, buying triggers, objections, desired outcomes, and emotional tone, and shows how to apply them across marketing and operations. Greg wraps up by introducing a simple framework for turning insights into action using a three-column spreadsheet (“theme,” “what customers say,” and “what we’ll do about it”), urging marketers to focus on high-impact fixes that improve conversions and customer experience, and to revisit feedback monthly to stay aligned with what customers truly care about.
Key Takeaways
- AI doesn’t replace customer research – it amplifies it: AI eliminates bias and fatigue, surfacing insights humans miss and allowing brands to act faster and smarter on real customer data.
- Focus on the “why” behind customer behavior: The goal isn’t just to know what customers said, it’s to uncover why they said it. That “why” informs strategy, messaging, and product decisions.
- Four types of insights matter most: Buying triggers, objections, desired outcomes, and emotional tone reveal the motivations and barriers shaping customer behavior.
- Turn feedback into action with a simple framework: Use a sheet with columns for “theme,” “what customers say,” and “what we’ll do about it” to prioritize changes that drive business impact.
- Make feedback analysis a quarterly habit: Customer sentiment shifts constantly. Running AI analysis every 90 days helps brands stay aligned with emerging needs and maintain an edge.
Questions To Ask Yourself
- How could your team use AI to process and analyze customer feedback more efficiently today?
- What buying triggers or objections consistently appear in your customer reviews, and how could you use those in your ad or site copy?
- Where does bias currently influence how you or your team interpret customer data, and how can AI help eliminate it?
- Which part of your marketing (ads, product pages, emails, etc.) could benefit most from direct customer language?
- How can you implement a recurring process (monthly or quarterly) to reanalyze customer sentiment and update strategy accordingly?
Episode Links
Greg Shuey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-shuey/
Formwise.ai: https://www.formwise.ai/
Tally: https://tally.so/
Episode Transcript
Greg Shuey (00:01.474)
Hey everyone, welcome to these seven figures and beyond e-commerce marketing podcast. I am your host, Greg Shuey. I created this podcast to help direct to consumer business owners and marketers who are stuck and who are actively trying to find a way to grow their businesses. If you listen to our last episode, we talked about how to collect customer feedback on a budget.
We covered the scrappy, low cost ways to run surveys and to pull insights from chat transcripts, as well as reviews and social conversations without having to drop 50 grand on a market research firm. If you haven’t listened to that one yet, I would recommend hitting pause, go back, give that one a listen because today’s episode built right on top of it. And our next episode is going to build right on top of this one as well.
Because here’s the thing, getting the feedback is actually the easy part. The real magic happens when you take the data and you make sense of it. You know, trying to find the why as marketers and as business owners, we need to be really good at pulling out the why behind everything, because that why is going to guide us in building the right strategy and then executing it so that we can grow our businesses.
So today we’re talking about how to let AI analyze your customer feedback for you. How to take all of that raw messy data and turn it into clear actionable insights that you can use to refine your messaging, to improve your ads, to improve your creative, and potentially even influence future product development, which is a huge piece that not a lot of people talk about as well. So if you’re ready,
Greg Shuey (02:27.468)
Let’s dive in. So the ugly truth about analyzing customer feedback or these large data sets is that it does not scale, right? You might have hundreds. You might have thousands of survey responses, chat logs, reviews, or emails sitting in a spreadsheet, sitting in a Google Doc somewhere on your Google drive. And maybe you’ve told yourself, I’ll get to it someday. Or you know what? I’ve got an hour carved out next week.
And then that hour on your calendar gets bumped because something more important gets in, you know, put into place and it just keeps getting pushed off. So if you even take the time to look at your data, most disciplined marketers can only go through and can only read so much data before your brain starts actively filtering things out. Honestly, my limit is about 20 minutes.
So once you hit your you actually start seeing what you want to see in the data. I’ve seen it so many times. You cherry pick the stuff that fits the story that fits the narrative that you’re already trying to tell or that’s already in your head. I’m always amazed when I pass data off to my team after I’ve looked at it and they go in and they find additional things. They find other gems. They pull out other nuggets.
that I missed because I had hit my limit and then I just kept going. I kept slogging through it. When you use AI to take that data and to analyze it, that doesn’t happen, right? AI doesn’t get tired. AI doesn’t get biased. As long as you’re feeding it the right information with the right prompts, it doesn’t get biased. AI will look at every single word. AI will surface real patterns.
So think about it this way. If you have a hundred survey responses, it might take you two to three hours to manually tag and categorize those. That’s if you can even stomach getting through two to three hours, which I can’t. With AI, you can paste them into chat GPT or whatever your favorite LLM is, whether it’s Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, whatever. And you can get clustered insights in just a few minutes. That is what
Greg Shuey (04:54.798)
you should be using AI for is analyzing data, using it to find the why, finding patterns. That is what AI should be used for as a marketer. Now, I’m not saying that you should hand over all of your thinking to AI. That’s a really bad idea as a marketer. It is still your job and what you get paid for to take the findings, interpret it, and then apply
those findings to building the business. But if you let it do the heavy lifting, if you let it summarize cluster tag, you know, everything that frees you up to do the more strategic work that will actually move the needle. Okay. And that is the difference between being a reactive marketer as well as a proactive marketer, right? That that’s the difference in reactive versus proactive with your marketing.
Okay, all right, let’s talk about some of the tools you can use to start to make this easy. And again, because we’re being budget conscious, a lot of these tools are free or they’re extremely low cost. So first tool is whatever LLM you decide you want to use. I typically lean towards chat GPT. I also use Google Gemini. I very rarely use perplexity or Claude.
or even grok, right? Like I’ve played with them, but for large data sets and analysis, I typically lean towards the first two. So if you’ve got 50, if you’ve got a hundred reviews or open ended survey responses, just download those into a CSV or into an Excel and upload those and then try this prompt. This is probably my favorite prompt that I use.
Cluster these responses into themes like price, quality, trust, shipping, or experience. And then summarize what people are saying in each of these themes. So in just a few minutes, you’ll get a breakdown of what is driving satisfaction or what is driving frustration. Then what you’re going to want to do is you’re going to ask it to pull three to five direct
Greg Shuey (07:20.888)
quotes that represent each theme. OK, those are going to give you golden nuggets that you should use in your ad copy that you should use in your product descriptions. You can even use these in your emails that you are sending out any kind of marketing content that you’re putting together. These things can be used and will supercharge what you’re already doing, because these are actually real things coming from your customers. They are actually exactly.
the way that they speak about your products and they are very powerful pieces that you can use to be able to start to scale your growth. Okay, there’s another tool that I’ve come across recently called FormWise, F-O-R-M-W-I-S-E.A-I. If you want this kind of analysis baked right into your survey form,
This is the tool to use. I’ve never used it before, but I have seen a number of case studies on it. I’m going to be testing it this week. But I came across this and doing my research for this podcast and was really impressed with it, honestly. So you can create your survey and then FormWise will analyze every single response for sentiment, keywords, and intent automatically.
It’s perfect for post purchase surveys. It’s perfect for email feedback where you want those why insights to show up automatically just happens on autopilot, right? How good is this tool when compared to chat GPT and Gemini looking at large data sets? I’m not sure yet, but it’s definitely something that I’m going to look into and test and you should probably look into and test as well. All right.
This next one is a fun little automation stack if you’re really wanting to get fancy. So three tools, you’ve heard of two of them, Zapier and OpenAI, so your chat GPT, and then a little tool called Tally. So you can create your survey in Tally. You can then send each response through Zapier and then have the OpenAI API summarize it and drop the results right into a Google Sheet.
Greg Shuey (09:40.414)
Every new response gets summarized in real time. And then you can also set up a Slack message that goes out once a week with the top three themes mentioned by customers this week. That can go to anyone on your marketing team. That can go to your creative team. That can go to your CEO and go to whoever, right? This is like having a real time pulse on customer sentiment without anyone having to run any kind of reports.
How I found out about this, I chatted with a potential client this week who is actually doing this and I thought it was really cool. I thought it was worth mentioning and I am going to test this out for sure.
Greg Shuey (10:34.496)
OK, so once you’ve got all of your tools set up and again there there might be other amazing tools out there that you already use or you’re thinking of using great. Go test those and see if you like those. But once you have those set up. You might be thinking what on Earth should I be looking for? What should I be looking for? Inside of these snippets of content, right? I’ve touched a little bit on that already, but we’re going to get quite a bit deeper here in this next section, so.
The better question you should be asking instead of what should I be looking for is what kind of insights can AI actually surface that matter to me as a marketer or a brand owner? Do you see how that’s a lot different of a question, right? It’s far more strategic and far more focused so that you can figure out what you need to pull out of this. So for our agency,
Here are the four things that we typically focus on. So the first one is buying triggers. The second one is objections. The third one is desired outcomes. And the fourth one is emotional tones. So let’s talk about buying triggers first. What actually makes people decide to buy from you? So AI can identify recurring phrases like finally, or exactly what I needed.
or this solved my problem. That is your buying trigger language. And there’s probably a dozen or two dozen of these that are specific and relevant to your business. As you start to go through customer reviews, you’ll be able to see these now that you know of finally exactly what I need and solve my problem. You’ll be able to pull those out yourself and start to make sense of all of that, right?
This should show up in your ads. should show up in your headlines. It should show up in your PDP pages in your copy. We want to be able to highlight and call out those specific buying triggers. Second objections. AI is great at spotting what almost stopped someone from purchasing. These are friction points that could potentially, well, drastically improve your website conversion rate. If you are flipping them.
Greg Shuey (13:01.806)
180 degrees and then using them kind of in all of those places as well. So look for patterns like I wasn’t sure it was going to fit or shipping took too long or price was a little high, right? These are things you need to fix if they aren’t necessarily true or you have content or things to to help address these.
That is what you want to put on the site and in the ad copy right away. The next one is desired outcomes. These are the results that people want to achieve. So you’ll see things like, I wanted something that lasted longer, or I needed something easy to use, right? You can see right away that these are absolute messaging goldmine, right? Like easy to use.
last longer than the competition. These things should all be weaved throughout your ad copy, your product description pages, those types of things. And then lastly, emotional tone. So this is probably the most underrated insight you can get. But as we know as marketers, emotion is what sells period. Okay, so believe it or not, AI tools can actually detect emotion. They can detect excitement.
frustration, skepticism, and then they can categorize them by themes. So this will tell you exactly how your customers feel, not just what they say. So this is my favorite prompt that I like to use to start to pull out emotion. From these 100 reviews, identify recurring buying triggers, objections, desired outcomes, and emotional tone.
and return these results in a CSV or in a table of some sort, right? Absolutely simple, insanely powerful and super actionable, right? That is what we are working towards here. That is why we’re going through this process and these activities as marketers, all right? So now that you’ve gone through, you’ve fed all your data in, you’ve loaded the prompts, you’ve got the information back.
Greg Shuey (15:28.526)
And you have your sentiment clusters. You have your themes. You have all of your quotes. What do you do with them? OK, that is the million dollar question. We’ve touched on it a little bit. I think this is probably where most brands stop, right? They get a pile of insights and then they just let it sit there and they think they’ll get to it one day or they pass it off to a junior team member and then the junior team member doesn’t know what to do with it. Please don’t do that. That’s a really bad idea.
So I wanted to give you a super simple framework that you can start using today. What I would do is I would set up probably a Google Doc or an Excel sheet if you’re into that kind of thing with three columns. Okay, the first one is the theme. The second one is what customers say. And then the third one is what are we going to do about it? All right.
Theme and what customers say, those can come out of your current CSV or your Google Doc and you copy and paste those right in. And then you need to determine what you’re going to do about it. So three examples here. So the first one is theme, quality, what customers say, your zippers feel cheap. What we’ll do about it, we are going to add a video showing the zipper strength and that they actually are not cheap.
And then we’re going to update our copy to emphasize durability, right? That can then go into your project management system and someone can start working on that. Okay. The next one fit. I wasn’t sure about sizing. What we’ll do about it. We are going to add a sizing guide graphic or a PDF and call it out in the first carousel image, as well as in our ad copy and our product description page copy.
Okay, that can then, like I mentioned, go into your project management tool and someone can start working on it. Last one, shipping is the theme. What customers say took too long. What we’ll do about it. Add a ships into business days badge under our call to action. And then, I mean, don’t just do that unless you can actually ship into business days. Sometimes it may take a…
Greg Shuey (17:53.966)
You know, going up the chain, we need to go over to operations, right? We need to work with them to see how do we improve our shipping rates? How do we get it from seven to five? How do we get it to five to two? And then how do we, you know, position that in our ad copy or on our product description pages to where we can say ships into business days? That is how you turn feedback into action. It’s simple, right? All you really need.
is to carve out 30 to 45 minutes to start working on this. Do it each week. It doesn’t take that long and then start to rally the troops around the actionable items in getting them moving forward with these things. Okay. The key here, in my opinion, is to focus on business impact. So business impact is what is actually going to help
move the business forward, generate more top line revenue, generate more profit at the end of the day. And I think this is something that a lot of marketers forget. They look at their ROAS numbers, they look at their return on investment numbers, but overall business impact, what is that actually going to do for you? So you got to think about that. Don’t get lost in the weeds. Don’t try to fix everything.
identify two or three high leverage items that are actually going to help impact the growth of the business and start knocking those out. Okay. And then you’ll do it again and then you’ll do it again and then you’ll do it again. You’ll honestly be shocked at how much improvement you can make in conversion rates, how much improvement you can make in customer satisfaction, just by taking time to address and fix the most common friction.
points inside of your business. It’s crazy making an amazing customer experience not only improves conversion rates, but it also improves how many people refer you to their friends and family members. Like it just there’s so many added benefits to that that will actually help you start scaling your organization. So start there. Okay. So now that you’ve got this analysis, it’s time to plug it into your broader
Greg Shuey (20:17.74)
marketing strategy. Most of the time as a specialist or a marketing manager, you’re probably not taking these things and using it to build your marketing strategy. Some, I guess some marketing managers could, but this is like a director level, a VP level, a CMO level to be able to take all of these insights and information and then be able to start including this in these different areas. So there’s, there’s really three areas that I haven’t broken out as. So the first one is
your audience personas. So drop those exact quotes and patterns right inside of your personas. Let the customer’s words describe who they are and what they value. And that is incredibly important because a lot of time customer personas are just an assumption. Just an assumption. When I talk to brands and I ask them, who’s your ideal customer?
They just start rattling off things they say, just like me, right? That is not a customer persona. Customer persona should be based on hard factual data and then include these quotes and patterns right inside of them so that they are actually representative of a real person, okay? The next thing is your positioning docs. So rework your brand promise or your messaging pillars using the patterns that emerge most frequently.
Yes, you can rework brand promises and you should rework them, especially as you get better as an organization, as you get more efficient as an organization, as you fix friction points or identify other pain points or problem areas that you can address. You can rework those, you can change those. They are not set in stone, okay? The last one is your content strategy.
Work these into your content strategy and use them to help build blog posts, to help build your emails that are going out, to help you build video content around objections or desires that you saw over and over and over again in the data. So if shipping anxiety was the biggest theme, maybe you create a blog post titled, how we ship faster and fresher than anyone else in the industry. Yes, that’s not a sexy post.
Greg Shuey (22:36.312)
Whatsoever. It’s not a best of post. It’s not a post that you know is top of funnel or middle of funnel that helps educate and inform. Maybe it’s just a trust building piece that helps reduce anxiety. Okay. And you could do that. You are allowed to do that. You have permission to do that. Or if your biggest buying trigger was finally something that fits right. That should be your next ad hook. Test that.
AI makes it incredibly easy to find these angles. You just need to take the time to act on those. Okay. And then a little bonus tip here, keep it fresh. Don’t just do this once. Customer sentiment changes constantly, especially in this weird world that we live in right now. It’s crazy out there. People’s buying patterns and behavior changes all the time.
Put it on your calendar to do this every quarter. Rerun your reviews, rerun your survey responses through AI and look for how the tone or theme shift because they absolutely will. What you’re gonna see is you’re gonna spot new product opportunities. You’re gonna spot emerging objections. You’re gonna spot shifts in buying motivation long before your competitors do. They’re not doing this every 90 days. And this is the kind of insight
that compounds over time and that helps create strong winning brands. All right. So kind of wrap this one up and summarize what we’ve talked about today. AI isn’t replacing customer research. AI is absolutely amplifying customer research and it’s making it easier for brands to be able to see patterns faster, make smarter decisions.
and act on insights while they are still relevant. All right, I’m leaving you with the challenge today. Take your last 50 reviews or survey responses, drop them into chat GPT or whatever you use and ask it to cluster and summarize them. Okay, you can do this in less than 10 minutes today. So as soon as you’re done here, pull those at them, all right? Then,
Greg Shuey (25:00.28)
Pick one theme that stands out, go through my process with three columns and identify two or three things that you will go fix, update or build on. And it doesn’t have to be you, it can be someone on your team. But if you’re a loan marketer, like many people are, then you’re gonna need to carve some time out to go do that as well, all right? I promise that if you do this every single month,
you will build a marketing engine that’s always aligned with your customers and what they actually care about, which is so critical what they actually care about. All right. I hope that today’s episode was helpful. Thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you for listening to me. If you found it helpful, please take a minute to share this with a fellow brand owner or marketer. I would really appreciate that.
And I hope that you tune in again next week where we drop our third part. That will be the last piece of really dialing in and scaling customer research for brands on a budget. Thanks so much for joining. Hope to see you again soon.
Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.