At this year’s IFA in Berlin, NielsenIQ (NIQ) is making a pitch to brands and retailers: stop guessing why shoppers behave the way they do. The consumer intelligence firm has enhanced its GfKnewron® Consumer platform with AI-Powered Shopper Voice, an upgrade that turns raw shopper comments into structured insights for better decision-making.
The addition layers consumer verbatims—shoppers’ comments in their own words—on top of NIQ’s point-of-sale tracking data, which already spans more than 1 billion transactions worldwide. The result: a sharper view into not just what people buy, but also why.
From Metrics to Meaning
Traditionally, platforms like GfKnewron offered dashboards full of sales and survey data. Useful, but often shallow. Shopper Voice promises to close that gap by processing 160,000+ verbatim comments through AI, generating summaries and coding themes into quantifiable insights.
Among the new features:
- 100-word real-time summaries of consumer feedback.
- Context-rich explanations of Net Promoter Scores (NPS), helping brands see the drivers behind loyalty—or churn.
- Strengths and weaknesses analysis, linking verbatim sentiment directly to product performance or retail partners.
For brand and retail teams, the pitch is efficiency. Instead of drowning in comments or manually tagging themes, AI surfaces the top issues and improvement opportunities in seconds.
A Global Rollout
The upgrade is rolling out across 15 markets in APAC, Europe, and Latin America, and will be available to all GfKnewron Consumer clients. That means brands with global footprints can benchmark sentiment consistently across regions, while still drilling down into local nuance.
Julian Baldwin, President of Technology and Durables at NIQ, positioned the move as the next evolution of customer analytics: “Our ability to decode customer feedback is transforming how we predict and personalize every step of their journey. Combined with survey and market data, AI-Powered Shopper Voice will enable faster decision-making, improved customer loyalty & satisfaction, and execution with precision.”
Why It Matters
The timing couldn’t be better. As retailers and manufacturers struggle with flattening demand for tech and durables, the ability to connect sales data with consumer sentiment could prove a competitive advantage.
Rivals from Qualtrics to Sprinklr already offer AI-powered customer feedback tools, but NIQ’s edge lies in pairing shopper verbatims with its trusted POS datasets. That integration could help close the long-standing loop between what customers say and what they buy.
If it works as advertised, Shopper Voice could finally move customer analytics from a rear-view exercise into a forward-looking tool for product development and retail strategy.
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