Mine customer language from reviews

Your client's customers have already written some of the site's best lines. They're in the reviews, in their own words, waiting to be copied out.

A business describes itself in the vocabulary of its trade. Its customers use their own. A fictional children's swimming school says 'aquatic confidence programs'. Its reviews say 'they didn't rush him', 'she finally put her face in', and 'the teacher's in the water'. The second set is what a nervous parent types into a search box.

Collect reviews from wherever customers post them: listings, booking sites, the replies under social posts, and messages the client is willing to share. Read the three-star reviews, which are often the most specific. Check a platform's terms before you automate collecting. And ask the client what people ask on the phone, because that's customer language that never made it into a review.

Pull four kinds of phrase. The problem they had, in their words. What worried them before they booked. What surprised them, good or bad. And whatever they call the service. 'Five stars, lovely staff' gives you nothing. 'I was worried he'd cry the whole lesson' gives you a headline and an objection to answer.

The trap is summarizing. Ask an AI to read two hundred reviews and tell you what customers think, and you get 'parents value the patient approach'. True, and useless, because nobody talks like that. You want exact phrases in quotation marks, each with the review it came from. Then check a sample against the originals, because a paraphrase can slip in looking like a quote. A quote you can't trace is a quote you can't check.

Here's the prompt, run on a file of reviews you've already collected. It asks for the four kinds of phrase, word for word, each with a line number so you can check it in seconds. It also says not to fix spelling, because the customer's odd word is sometimes exactly the one you want.

The glossary keeps two lists. Words to reuse, with a count of how often they come up. Words to avoid: ones customers use when they're complaining, and the company's own terms that no customer ever says. Every phrase points back to the file of collected reviews, so you can show the client where it came from. The counts are for your choices, never a statistic to publish. Keep it short enough to read in a minute. Twenty good phrases beat two hundred.

One boundary. Borrowing the way customers put things, in your own copy, is fine; you're learning their vocabulary. Putting a review on the site as a testimonial, with a name next to it, is a claim and a use of someone's words. It needs a source and, where it's needed, permission. Keep the two in separate files so one doesn't drift into the other.

Then use it. Read the glossary before you write a line of the site. When the draft says 'program', ask what parents call it. When you brief an agent to write copy, give it the glossary file by path and make the avoid list a hard rule. Then read the headlines aloud against the 'use' list. If none of the customers' words survived, the copy has slipped back into the company's voice. The customers' worries are also your questions page.

Write in the customer's words, not the company's.