Digital Marketing Blog

In the last few years I’ve used a variety of customer feedback systems. Some were highly functional packaged solutions requiring considerable investment of financial and technical resources. Others were bespoke developments, unique to the requirements of individual businesses. One way or another, they’ve all been based around the theme of customer “ratings and reviews” and all offer the same fundamental benefits: powerful peer-to-peer recommendations that increase sales, improved customer service and SEO-enhancing user-generated content.

The one that’s impressed me most in recent months is Feefo, an award-winning solution described as the “independent honest feedback service“.

Founded in 2006 and headquartered in London, the company has an international client-base that’s growing fast. In March this year, Feefo partnered with e-commerce solution provider Actinic to provide their customer feedback mechanism as a fully-integrated part of the Actinic software. Feefo were also recently recognised as the ECMOD Website and Digital Development Supplier of the Year 2010.

Their success is well-deserved, as Tim Curtis, MD of Lands’ End in Northern Europe, highlights:

Probably the greatest tool we have discovered for service improvement has been Feefo, which we use to solicit feedback from our online customers. This allows us to react personally, proportionally and purposefully to any issues our customers find, and to spot any positive or negative trends in our business.

There are three key reasons why Feefo has impressed me and why I’m recommending it to clients:

1) Feefo is highly cost-effective

The full service only costs £499 per month, with £249 and £99 smaller-scale options available. There’s also a free trial of the service to allow businesses to test the water with off-site feedback results before deciding which package is appropriate to their needs.

2) Feefo is simple to implement

Displaying customer feedback is achieved by adding just four lines of code to every relevant page of a site (with a variable for product identification).

3) Feefo uses email to invite feedback

Rather than asking for feedback immediately after checkout, or relying on voluntary feedback submissions in later site visits, Feefo emails customers to invite their feedback once they’ve received their goods. The customer data can be supplied to Feefo automatically via an “auto-notify” script or in batches in spreadsheet format. This method ensures that feedback is only from genuine customers.

However, the benefits of using a customer feedback system come from what you do with all the data that gets collected. It needs to be engaged with and thoroughly understood. It needs to guide customer service and user experience optimisation. And it needs to add-value to website content in an honest and transparent way.

The examples below illustrate some of the ways that Feefo’s solution can integrate customer feedback content into a site.

Feefo’s own Example Supplier demo site shows a Feefo “Service” score. Clicking on the Feefo logo displays a “floating window” containing all the detailed customer feedback:

On the Lands’ End site, the Feefo score for each product is displayed beneath the thumbnail images:

Clicking the score opens a pop-up window that shows a summary of all the service and product feedback Lands’ End have received…

…along with individual customer comments about the specific product that was being viewed:

The payback on using a system like Feefo can be considerable:

• Consumers trust user generated content more than any other form of advertising
• Profits can increase by as much as 15%
• Conversion rates can treble
• Returns can decrease by as much as 15%
• You get to hear from customers who wouldn’t normally find their voice
• Staff gain a great deal of motivation when they see good feedback about them

Chris Rucker, Founder of The White Company, is clear about the commercial benefits of Feefo:

Any online business that cares about their customer service and reputation should be a member of Feefo. It has made a profound impact to our operational focus, our service delivery experience and the way in which we measure our own performance internally. We use Feefo every single day, it gives us an immediate and direct insight into how our products are performing and how our customers feel about customer service.

To find out more about their customer feedback solution, visit the Feefo website and follow them on Twitter @Feefo_Official.