Your Worst Reviews Can Be Your Best Friend

Founded in 2017 in New York City’s Garment District, Suits Outlets sells men’s suits, tuxedos, and accessories to customers across the United States. The company has grown into multiple warehouses across New York and New Jersey.

Daniel Liu, Founder of Suits Outlets, was on his quarterly check-in call with Masego Manamela, his senior client experience manager at Bizrate Insights. After a few minutes of chatting, Masego turned to what Suits Outlets’ last few months of feedback had surfaced when Liu jumped in:

“Honestly, the negative reviews are more helpful to me. The good reviews all look the same. Negative reviews are where we can find the problem and improve ourselves.”

Always on the hunt for perfection, Liu reads through every new review himself, week after week. And he goes straight for the bad ones.

Reading the complaints first

Most merchants read the five-star notes first and treat the review feed as social proof. Liu reads it the other way around.

“I want to see the problem. Basically, I want to find room to improve.” He confides, “I want to pretend I’m a customer, and see where there’s potential improvement.”

So he reads reviews every week, staying ahead of anything that could cause his customers to lose trust in his brand.

Earning trust without the fitting room

Trust is essential for any retailer, but for Suits Outlets, trust is everything.

People who buy a suit usually want to do it in person. They want to feel the weight of the fabric, see the color in real light, and check how the jacket sits before they pay.

Selling the same suit online means asking a first-time buyer to commit to all of that sight unseen. As Daniel describes it, “Earning their trust for a first-time online purchase is our biggest hurdle, making verified review data our most important asset.”

That’s why the feedback after each order matters so much to him. It shows him how he’s doing, and helps him serve the next customer that much better. Feedback plays a big part in how Daniel understands shoppers and ensures they have the best possible experience.

Taking action… the right action

In the quarterly review while reading the negative comments together, Daniel and Masego noticed the issues fell into two distinct groups, and each called for a different fix. Bizrate Insights’ voice-of-customer data lives on our VitalSigns dashboard and is updated in real time, so they were able to take action on the most current available data. 

Problems of Information

Some complaints weren’t really about the suit. The garment was exactly what Suits Outlets meant to sell, but there was a disconnect between what the customer had pictured from the photos and descriptions. So that’s where Daniel went to work, tightening the listings so the suit a shopper imagined matched the one that arrived at the door. He said, “We should make the product descriptions more informative. Give customers enough information before they pull the trigger.”

The patterns were small but consistent:

• The weight and feel of the fabric. Material that came across as substantial in the images felt lighter or thinner in person than buyers expected.
• Cut and fit. With little to say whether a style ran slim or relaxed, the jacket sat differently through the shoulders and chest than shoppers had imagined.

Better information was the fix, here. By adding a line about fabric weight or sizing guidance, Daniel ensured fewer customers would be caught off guard.

Problems of Quality

The description fix handles one kind of complaint. A different kind points at the suit itself, and Daniel routes those straight to the people who make it. As he describes his process, “I forward these specific verbatims directly to our production department to implement improvements for the very next batch.”

These showed up as:

• Construction and finishing. A pocket sewn “not loose enough and is hard to open,” or sleeve finishing that came back crooked.
• A product that didn’t match the page. A suit that arrived a different color than the website photo showed, like a burgundy ordered with a gold detail missing from the garment that shipped.

By routing each complaint to the side that can actually act on it, Daniel turns a pile of returns-in-waiting into two clear to-do lists, one for his team, one for his suppliers. He sizes a problem before acting on it, waiting until a complaint shows up more than once before making changes.  That restraint lets him “make confident, large-scale manufacturing tweaks rather than overreacting to isolated incidents.” 

Adding his own analysis layer

Routing a complaint is only half the job. The other half is knowing whether the fix took, and that’s what Daniel’s monthly habit accomplishes.

He downloads his review data and analyzes it  with a fixed set of questions he asks every time, like:

• What’s a brand-new complaint that hasn’t surfaced before?
• Where is feedback improving or slipping?
• Which topics drive the most praise and the most frustration?
• What’s going wrong with product quality or fulfillment?

Mining for gold

The most interesting question on his list, most stores never think to ask. 

When a repeat customer places another order, he compares their sentiment with that of their previous purchase. That turns a returning buyer’s two orders into a before-and-after, so he can see whether the fixes he’s made actually changed the experience for the same person. 

The result is a short monthly read on what’s changed and what to fix next.

Past Experiences

Liu had tried a review tool before, running Trustpilot for about a year. But he didn’t renew. 

“It really didn’t do much other than collect reviews,” he said. “No fancy features like filters or AI summaries. So we felt it was providing limited information.” 

But Bizrate Insights had free-for-everyone tools in every plan, including the VitalSigns dashboard and AI comment summary tools. 

Industry-Leading Service

He also valued something unique to Bizrate Insights. Every client gets hands-on care from a dedicated account manager who will help them dig into their data and mine insights that will move the needle. 

When he asked whether Manamela’s analysis was generated by the system, she told him she builds it herself: the platform supplies the charts and KPIs, and she reads the comments to work out why customers rate the way they do. 

“Super helpful,” Liu said. “It’s basically raw data, and we need to extract what’s meaningful and helpful from it.” For him, the platform and the person reading it alongside him are part of the same value.

It’s in our DNA

And that’s a service Bizrate Insights is proud to deliver. We offer customer feedback and insights from pre-purchase through post-fulfillment, providing a 360-degree view of the buyers’ journey. And we’re the most hands-on solution available, just ask Daniel. Reach out today, and you too can begin a relationship with our team of data and feedback experts.

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