Listen and Learn - Increasing Sales Through Customer Feedback
Thursday, 05 August 2010 01:00
Anyone associated with the web will know the term “Web 2.0”. It was coined by Tim O'Reilly to define the interactive web where communication and content is a two way process. This concept has really gone mainstream and one aspect is the growing adoption of customer feedback systems on ecommerce web sites.
It’s a hard pill to swallow, but the truth is that every business now gets feedback disseminated for all to see, irrespective of whether they ask for it or not. The past few years have seen a big shift in power, enabled by the internet. Previously, dissatisfied customers couldn’t do much. They could call a company that had upset them and tell friends. Maybe they could report them to Trading Standards or even take legal action themselves. None of these were serious threats.
That’s all changed now. A disaffected customer has a full smorgasbord of options. It’s simple to set up a blog and publish complaints, visit an online review site to make accusations or blast their point of view out on Twitter. Prospects, employees, vendors or even prospective investors searching on your company name will probably see these comments. A single disgruntled customer can now cause much more trouble than they could before.
Encourage feedback
Because of this power shift, I strongly recommend that every online merchant should provide a means for customers to provide feedback on products and services purchased.
Formal customer feedback enables you to enter into a dialogue with customers, including disgruntled ones, which both grows loyalty and enables you to garner valuable insights into your business. Assuming you are focused on providing a good level of quality and service, positive feedback will make it much easier for people browsing your site to make the decision to purchase. Comments on your site provide additional search engine benefits, especially as Google has recently added customer feedback tags, that put the information directly into search results.
Drawing complaints to your site means they are less likely to appear across the web where you may not be able to respond.
Independent or grow your own?
Either feedback can be independently managed by a third party so you can’t change it, or it can be under your direct control.
As a site owner, it seems crazy to open our sites up to comments from disgruntled customers. But this is old school of thinking, and it’s critical to understand that feedback is going to appear anyway. If it doesn’t appear on your site, you simply ensure that you can’t respond to it, and may not know about it.
In fact, when I view customer feedback I expect to see an element of dissatisfaction. Even the best stores get it wrong from time to time or have difficult customers. If the feedback is uniformly positive, I don’t trust it. So negative feedback validates the truth of the good comments.
Limit feedback to customers
The argument for restricting feedback to customers is simple. Your customers are engaged with you, they have parted with their money. They are more interested in your products and services, whether good or bad. You can solicit them pro-actively for feedback, and make it easy. The result is that you will get more feedback by targeting your customers.
This also avoids the problems that arise from competitors providing phoney feedback, or disgruntled customers feeding back repeatedly. With a direct relationship between customers and orders, these problems are avoided.
Who to choose
There are several feedback service operators out there and it’s worth checking out Feefo, Bazaarvoice and Reevoo. Some ecommerce packages build in feedback systems that operate solely on the merchant’s own site. I must declare an interest as my company has recently formed a strategic partnership with Feefo, (which stands for Feedback Forum) to give smaller web retailers the opportunity to use the service at a lower cost.
Last thoughts
Things are changing fast. It’s always been true that really successful businesses listened to their customers, but in the past it was still possible to survive without doing this. Today, there is no place to hide. Customers will provide feedback and the question is whether you manage it to your advantage, or your customers use it to your disadvantage. Studies have suggested that the rise in sales from an effective system can be around a 10%, so this is a subject which nobody can afford to ignore.
The article was written by Chris Barling, CEO of ecommerce specialist, Actinic. Originally posted on Fresh business thinking.com.