What is a Consumer Report?

A consumer report is a statement representing how satisfied consumers are with a product or a company. A consumer report can be for a company or product. If a company has two products, then a combination of the consumer reports of the two products would constitute the consumer report for the company.

A consumer report always shows a 'consumer satisfaction index' which is a numerical score, number of stars or a color that represents how satisfied consumers are with that product. In the case of Consumerdaddy.com consumer reports, the 'consumer satisfaction index' is an overall score, ranging from 0 to 10. A product with a consumer report indicating 10 overall score would mean that the consumers are absolutely satisfied with the product. A product with a consumer report indicating 0 overall score would mean that the consumers are absolutely dissatisfied with the product.

Differences between Consumer Reports and Consumer Reviews

Consumer reports are different from consumer reviews. A consumer review is merely a positive or negative expression about a product; commonly followed by a numeric score the consumer gave the product. A consumer report is much more than that. A consumer report will have a data from a large number of consumer reviews from consumers in addition to other information such as a listing of the company’s customer care number, the history of consumer satisfaction with the product, a list of traits of the product and how well the product performs in each of these traits, and so on.

Elements of a Consumer Report

A consumer report must have the following elements.

• The name of the product
• The category the product belongs to (for example, Travel > Airlines > Domestic Airlines)
• The name of the company that delivers the product
• The technical details of the product
• The overall consumer satisfaction with the product
• The number of positive and negative consumer reviews about the product
• The number of complaints about the product
• The traits of the product and ratings for each of them

Consumerdaddy.com’s consumer reports are examples of good consumer reports for products and services in India. You can see a sample consumer report from Consumerdaddy.com by clicking on the image below.

What Constitutes a Good Consumer Report?

A good consumer report has the following characteristics:

• It is a genuine reflection of consumer perception of the product. Very commonly we find consumer reports that have opinions from “experts”. Most likely these "experts" are people paid by the companies to give them a good report. When it comes to a consumer product, why are "experts" needed? The consumer himself / herself is the best expert at assessing how good a consumer product is. So in future when you see "expert" opinion on a consumer report, there is your red flag about the authenticity of the data used to complile the report. The rule of the thumb is that the more you as a consumer can contribute to the consumer report's data, the more you can trust the consumer report. Consumerdaddy.com’s consumer reports are made SOLELY, EXCLUSIVELY and 100% from data obtained from common citizen consumers. It is a consumer report of the consumers, by the consumers, for the consumers.
• It must be independent. The company providing the consumer report must have no association with the company that delivers the product. In other words, the consumer report must be provided independently without any conflicts of interest. If the company that provides the consumer report endorses the product or in any way gets money from the company that delivers the product, you cannot trust that consumer report. For this very reason, consumerdaddy.com does not endorse any products or associate itself with any company. Even the advertisements that are on our site are advertisements placed through 'third parties' such as Google and Yahoo!. In other words, if you see a company's advertisement on our site, it does not mean that this company paid us. They paid 'third parties' to place their ads on several websites and our website just happened to be one of the sites that the third party placed it on. We DO NOT accept advertisements directly from any company that we provide consumer reports for UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE.
• It must be transparent. The consumer report must provide transparency on how the overall score has been calculated. Many companies claim that they provide consumer reports based on “consumer surveys”. The actual data of these “surveys” are seldom made available to the public. In this circumstance, there is no way for a consumer to know if the score is accurate and whether the survey has really happened or if the survey data has been manipulated in some manner. In contrast the Consumerdaddy.com consumer reports are highly transparent. Each time a praise (positive review) comes in, the overall score of the product is automatically increased slightly. Each time a criticism (negative review) comes in, the overall score of the product is automatically decreased slightly. Each time a company ignores a consumer complaint about the product, the score of the product is decreased significantly. To find out how transparent the Consumerdaddy.com consumer reports are please file a praise, criticism or a complaint about a product on this website, and see for yourself how the scores move up or down.
• It must have historical data. Most consumers not only want to find out how the company is doing now, but also how the company has been doing in the past. For this purpose the consumer report must clearly show historical statistical data of consumers' satisfaction with the company's products. A consumer may actually prefer a product of a company that has a history of increasing consumer satisfaction over the product of a company that has a history of decreasing consumer satisfaction. All Consumerdaddy.com reports show the available consumer satisfaction statistics for the past 12 months.
• It must be logically constructed. A consumer report that merely shows an overall score doesn’t make sense to most consumers. They want to know how the overall score is formed. They are sensitive to certain qualities of a product. For example, a consumer who uses an airline might be sensitive about the professionalism of the staff, as opposed to another consumer who is more concerned about the punctuality of it. For a consumer report to be logical and appealing, it must list all major traits of the product and how well the product does with respect to these individual traits.

Overall it can be concluded that a consumer report depicts levels of consumer satisfaction about a product. It must have a numerical overall score, which can be thought of as the consumer satisfaction index. Consumerdaddy.com consumer reports are logical, transparent, independent, and consumer centric reports that depict consumer satisfaction information in a well formatted and presentable manner.