Customer Reviews - What’s So Scary?
Although customer reviews on e-commerce websites are almost the norm today, many major sites still don’t allow for customers to submit reviews of their products and/or some stores filter reviews before they are published onto the site.
Studies have shown that adding customer reviews is a great way to increase conversion rates and provides value to the customer in the form of testimonial advice. Among different information sources, a recommendation word-of-mouth is considered the most important and trustworthy according to some studies.
In speaking to many industry insiders, I’ve come across a few key problems that retailers have to customer reviews which I have listed below:
- Vendor Relationship Management - Some retailers don’t like the idea of having negative reviews of any specific vendor’s products which can both affect sales and hurt the vendor/retailer relationship. At the same time, vendors may often pressure retailers to moderate/change reviews to put them in a favorable light, especially if they have limited exposure to selling online and/or tactics and best practices surrounding customer engagement.
- Expert/Authoritative Positioning - High-end and specialty retailers often build their brand and image around offering only the best products & services available. As such, all products that they carry should be “5 stars” and the cream of the crop, the idea that customers would rate them otherwise may undermine the idea that they are the experts at choosing products. These companies feel that they have to protect their status and image and believe that although customer reviews would be beneficial to other customers, it would hurt their brand-value and differentiating factor in the long run.
- Resource Management - All reviews need some sort of moderation system to weed out SPAM, obviously biased or fake reviews, as well as the occassional rude/irrelevant feedback given to a product. Many retailers just don’t have the manpower to moderate the feedback, especially on high traffic sites.
All of these reasons are understandable but I would urge retailers to consider the following benefits and guidelines surrounding creating working customer review systems: (Examples and Guidelines are taken from evaluating the customer review systems on Newegg.com, Amazon.com, as well as 3rd party feedback systems such as Bizrate, Pricegrabber, Shopping.com, and ResellerRatings.com)
Suggestions for Building Working Review Systems
- Incorporate vendors into your commenting system - Your suppliers and vendors should be looped in from the beginning in making sure that they can provide honest, accurate, and timely repsonse/feedback to customers who comment and review their products on your site. Doing so improves both the image of the vendor and your company and is a win-win situation. Gone are the days when companies can ignore feedback from customers, it’s time to embrace and respond, lest they want to end up on Consumerist.com.
- Moderate - It’s not censorship, it’s quality control, not content control. Some mild form of moderation should be employed to ensure that fake/immature reviews are edited (with disclosure) or prevented from being posted. In fact, if you suspect a post is from a competitor or is outright outlandish, you should contact the reviewer for them to edit their comment citing the reasons their comment was rejected.
- Leverage group-enabled content creation - Reviews are often rich sources of unbiased and expert opinions and reviews and as such can become valuable and free content for your site. Take advantage of that and make sure you incorporate the “ROI” from free content in determining whether or not your company has the resources to support a customer comment/review system.
Hopefully, I’ll start seeing more sites with reviews. Let me know if your company starts incorporating reviews and how it goes!
