Panda Q&A: the power of the review

Reviews. We all know why they're important. And we all know that there are loads of ways to collect and display them on our websites, across our social media pages, within our bricks and mortar stores ... So, rather than cover the basics, we thought we'd ask our favourite review hero, Felicity Wade-Palmer, some questions about the Feefo product.

Brace yourself for some serious answers ...

Question 1: Omni-channel love

Panda Q: We’ve long associated reviews with online stores, social media networks and sites like Yelp. How are businesses using Feefo Places to enhance the offline customer experience? Are multi-channel retailers making good use of this too? 

Felicity: As the ecommerce sector has grown, with consumers favouring convenience, competitive prices and extended choice, there’s a growing pressure on the offline world to optimise their shopping experience. Feefo Places offers bricks-and-mortar retailers a chance to engage with their customers and find out how their stores and staff are performing. Feefo's reporting suite allows them to make good use of the insights collected.

John Mihill, Operations Manager for TM Lewin, said: “Judging our use of Feefo, we can correlate high customer service with better customer retention, higher average sale value and increased footfall through our increased online promotion.”

Identifying behaviour and trends means that retailers can target their customers in a highly personalised way, creating smart marketing lists with email addresses that they might not otherwise have. Multi-channel retailers gain a 360 perspective of their customers’ behaviour- that abandoned basket, for instance, might have later been picked up in store, or a customer may have come back and purchased another item, but in a different colour.

Question 2: the almighty response rate 

Panda Q: We understand that response rates for Feefo review request emails are quite high. These days, people’s inboxes are busier than ever, and privacy is a growing concern. What steps should retailers take to ensure that they receive as much engagement from existing customers as possible?  

Felicity: There are four key points to which Feefo attributes their industry leading response rate, currently at 16.6% (NB this is across all sectors and includes insurance - comparatively few people want to talk about their insurance policy). 

1) All emails are mobile optimised. Figures vary depending on which report you read but all rest around 50% when asked how many emails are opened on a mobile.

2) Feefo's email message is clear. It looks like this:  

From: Feefo

Subject: Feedback request on behalf of [retailer] – Please Respond!

After multiple testing Feefo found that customers are more likely to leave honest feedback for a company to a third party than they are the company themselves.

3) It won’t take long. By reassuring the customer that their response need only take 15 seconds they know they have time to respond before they leave that Wi-Fi hotspot.

4) It is anonymous. The customer doesn’t have to publish their name anywhere, removing any concern that their thoughts on that product (which they’d maybe rather not admit to buying) will be found out!

Question 3: Does Google love Feefo?

Panda Q: Can you tell us more about how Google uses Feefo Service Ratings? What are the benefits of this to retailers?  

Felicity: Feefo has sent the most reviews to Google in Europe over the past year. Feefo's partnership means that merchants can be rewarded with increased visibility in AdWords and Google Shopping, increasing click through Rates (CTR), possibly reducing their Cost per Click (CPC).

Once a retailer has 30 reviews along with a 75% customer satisfaction score, Google rewards them with stars on their AdWords campaign. This increases site traffic by an average of 17% and also results in an increase in quality score. Our merchants find that this can lead to a reduction in their CPC by anything up to 25%!