What a review taxonomy is
A review taxonomy is the fixed set of categories every piece of feedback is sorted into. It is what lets you say "wait times are up at these five stores" rather than "some people mentioned waiting".
Use three levels
One level is too coarse to act on, and five is too fine to read. Three levels hold up well:
- Theme (L1): the broad area, such as Staff, Product, Store or App.
- Sub-theme (L2): the aspect within it, such as Helpfulness or Product knowledge.
- Issue (L3): the specific thing customers describe, such as No one available to help.
Leadership reads the themes, managers read the sub-themes, and the teams fixing things read the issues.
Start from your reviews, not your org chart
Read a broad sample of reviews and group what customers actually talk about before naming anything. Categories invented in advance tend to miss the issues customers raise most and keep ones nobody mentions.
Track what customers love with the same categories. Strengths tell you what to protect when you change things.
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Keep it stable
Trends only mean something if the categories stay the same. Change the issue level as new problems appear, but keep themes and sub-themes fixed, and record when anything changes.
Give every theme an owner
A taxonomy is most useful when each theme maps to the team that can fix it: operations for Store, product for App, training for Staff. Then every finding arrives with someone to act on it.
Doing this with Falcon
Falcon builds a three-level taxonomy from your own reviews, ranks every theme, sub-theme and issue by volume with its sentiment, and lets you drill from a theme to the reviews behind it in one click.