While most retailers now accept customer reviews as an essential component of product content, there have been plenty of missteps along the way. First merchants tried to ignore reviews, until sites like Epinions and later Angie's List and Yelp gained enough credibility with consumers to make that impossible. Some sought the easy way out by buying fake reviews, but savvy consumers and researchers quickly caught on. (So did the New York attorney general, who last year cracked down on such "astroturfing.")
Others tried to get tough on negative reviewers by threatening to take legal action, which didn't turn out to be such a good PR move, either.
Forward-thinking retailers, meanwhile, came to view online customer reviews as a key tool to help shoppers gain confidence in their purchases and drive conversions. Instead of being threatened by reviews, they embraced them, integrating them into their sites and social outposts and honing techniques to make them as authentic and useful to shoppers as possible.
In short, they practiced the customer-centric approach we at MarketLive call customer-driven commerce.
Now reviews are increasingly widespread, but the ubiquity of reviews and the increasingly savvy online consumers who consult them require merchants to up their game. Here are a few ways to make sure your customer review program is best-of-breed:
1. Seek reviews from those in the know. It turns out that shoppers base purchasing decisions less on the star ratings, which the "astroturfing" scandals have made suspect, and more on the actual text of the review itself.
According to a 2013 study of more than 18,000 Amazon.com reviews, positive reviews with a more credible linguistic style had more impact than generic reviews displaying no particular expertise about the product. In essence, shoppers can tell when reviewers know what they're talking about. To enhance the credibility of your reviews, encourage submissions from frequent or long-time buyers who are best able to evaluate and compare products.
2. Let shoppers "review the review." Allowing shoppers to vote on whether a particular contribution was helpful gives merchants a key criterion for prioritizing display of reviews. This feature has become more and more useful as merchants’ top-selling products often include hundreds of reviews.
The ability to comment on reviews also enables a dialogue among customers and prospects. And, of course, customer service staff can use the commenting feature to respond to reviews and provide further information.
3. Summarize the best reviews. Aggregating and averaging star ratings is helpful and common, but shoppers want to quickly dig into the underlying details. Merchants should provide a summary sampling of the most popular comments so that shoppers can quickly scan to get the gist of opinions. The summary should be representative of the entire body of reviews for the product — good and bad — while showcasing the reviews deemed most helpful.
Perricone MD uses PowerReviews to provide a review snapshot that includes the most liked positive and negative reviews, along with a list of popular product attributes as indicated by reviewers. Eastland Shoes goes further and asks reviewers to enumerate each item's pros, cons and best uses.
4. Enable multimedia reviews. Since consumers increasingly have a camera and video recorder within easy reach (i.e., their smartphone), merchants should go beyond text-and-ratings reviews to take advantage of this new potential pool of user-generated content.
Review submission forms should prominently invite inclusion of photos and video, and review displays should showcase multimedia content. In addition, merchants should allow shoppers to sort and filter reviews according to whether they have images or video, and even consider adding the presence of multimedia reviews as an attribute for guided search alongside star ratings.
Retro-style clothing and home decor merchant ModCloth includes photo submission on its review form, and pictures are displayed alongside review text. Title Nine, the retailer of athletic and sportswear apparel designed for active women, has followed suit, allowing users to spice up their reviews by adding images or videos of the product in use.
5. Leave negative reviews up, but respond. Allowing negative reviews to remain on your site can be a crucial way to build credibility with consumers. Those glowing reviews ring truer when shoppers see you're not hiding anything. That said, customer service staff needs to respond swiftly to concerns.
A shopper from upstate New York took to Sundance's website to complain of workmanship in a sweater she purchased from the retailer of upscale rustic clothing and home decor. The rebuke loses much of its sting however when she writes, "Sundance sent a new one and so far so good." The takeaway for prospective shoppers? This is a company that isn't afraid to admit problems and fix them when they arise.
For merchants committed to truly serving their customers, embracing online feedback — all of it — and presenting it in ways others can benefit from helps build customer confidence and brand loyalty.
Ken Burke is the founder and executive chairman of MarketLive, an on-demand e-commerce platform and solutions provider. Ken can be reached at ken@marketlive.com.
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Keeping Pace With the Explosion in Popularity and Innovation of Online Consumer Reviews
While most retailers now accept customer reviews as an essential component of product content, there have been plenty of missteps along the way. First merchants tried to ignore reviews, until sites like Epinions and later Angie's List and Yelp gained enough credibility with consumers to make that impossible. Some sought the easy way out by buying fake reviews, but savvy consumers and researchers quickly caught on. (So did the New York attorney general, who last year cracked down on such "astroturfing.")
Others tried to get tough on negative reviewers by threatening to take legal action, which didn't turn out to be such a good PR move, either.
Forward-thinking retailers, meanwhile, came to view online customer reviews as a key tool to help shoppers gain confidence in their purchases and drive conversions. Instead of being threatened by reviews, they embraced them, integrating them into their sites and social outposts and honing techniques to make them as authentic and useful to shoppers as possible.
In short, they practiced the customer-centric approach we at MarketLive call customer-driven commerce.
Now reviews are increasingly widespread, but the ubiquity of reviews and the increasingly savvy online consumers who consult them require merchants to up their game. Here are a few ways to make sure your customer review program is best-of-breed:
1. Seek reviews from those in the know. It turns out that shoppers base purchasing decisions less on the star ratings, which the "astroturfing" scandals have made suspect, and more on the actual text of the review itself.
According to a 2013 study of more than 18,000 Amazon.com reviews, positive reviews with a more credible linguistic style had more impact than generic reviews displaying no particular expertise about the product. In essence, shoppers can tell when reviewers know what they're talking about. To enhance the credibility of your reviews, encourage submissions from frequent or long-time buyers who are best able to evaluate and compare products.
2. Let shoppers "review the review." Allowing shoppers to vote on whether a particular contribution was helpful gives merchants a key criterion for prioritizing display of reviews. This feature has become more and more useful as merchants’ top-selling products often include hundreds of reviews.
The ability to comment on reviews also enables a dialogue among customers and prospects. And, of course, customer service staff can use the commenting feature to respond to reviews and provide further information.
3. Summarize the best reviews. Aggregating and averaging star ratings is helpful and common, but shoppers want to quickly dig into the underlying details. Merchants should provide a summary sampling of the most popular comments so that shoppers can quickly scan to get the gist of opinions. The summary should be representative of the entire body of reviews for the product — good and bad — while showcasing the reviews deemed most helpful.
Perricone MD uses PowerReviews to provide a review snapshot that includes the most liked positive and negative reviews, along with a list of popular product attributes as indicated by reviewers. Eastland Shoes goes further and asks reviewers to enumerate each item's pros, cons and best uses.
4. Enable multimedia reviews. Since consumers increasingly have a camera and video recorder within easy reach (i.e., their smartphone), merchants should go beyond text-and-ratings reviews to take advantage of this new potential pool of user-generated content.
Review submission forms should prominently invite inclusion of photos and video, and review displays should showcase multimedia content. In addition, merchants should allow shoppers to sort and filter reviews according to whether they have images or video, and even consider adding the presence of multimedia reviews as an attribute for guided search alongside star ratings.
Retro-style clothing and home decor merchant ModCloth includes photo submission on its review form, and pictures are displayed alongside review text. Title Nine, the retailer of athletic and sportswear apparel designed for active women, has followed suit, allowing users to spice up their reviews by adding images or videos of the product in use.
5. Leave negative reviews up, but respond. Allowing negative reviews to remain on your site can be a crucial way to build credibility with consumers. Those glowing reviews ring truer when shoppers see you're not hiding anything. That said, customer service staff needs to respond swiftly to concerns.
A shopper from upstate New York took to Sundance's website to complain of workmanship in a sweater she purchased from the retailer of upscale rustic clothing and home decor. The rebuke loses much of its sting however when she writes, "Sundance sent a new one and so far so good." The takeaway for prospective shoppers? This is a company that isn't afraid to admit problems and fix them when they arise.
For merchants committed to truly serving their customers, embracing online feedback — all of it — and presenting it in ways others can benefit from helps build customer confidence and brand loyalty.
Ken Burke is the founder and executive chairman of MarketLive, an on-demand e-commerce platform and solutions provider. Ken can be reached at ken@marketlive.com.