The Positive Opportunity of Negative Feedback
The Lansdowne Club in Mayfair was the venue yesterday afternoon for an e-tailing seminar hosted by Feefo, the customer feedback service I reviewed back in October.
The event featured informative and entertaining talks from Andrew Curran of My-Wardrobe.com and Nick Wheeler of Charles Tyrwhitt about their experience of working with Feefo and the variety of benefits their businesses have enjoyed as a result.
Cutting a long story short, using a feedback service like Feefo increases sales and improves customer service. Bill Crawley, the energetic founder of Feefo, offered a simple analogy that highlights why:
You’re on a beach and you want to go swimming in the sea, but you’re wary about the potential risk of sharks. You see one person wade in, but you stay on the beach just in case. Then you see twenty other people start swimming and now you’re feeling more confident that the sea is safe. Eventually there are two hundred people out there swimming and you’ve no hesitation about jumping in yourself.
People trust the recommendations of their peers and Feefo provides a mechanism for harnessing the value of those recommendations. It’s about more than boosting sales though, as Andrew Curran pointed out when he described how, in addition to user-generated content supporting SEO activity, the style of language used by customers in their reviews helps to guide the way My-Wardrobe.com talks to people on social networks like Twitter and Facebook.
One statistic that emerged from the discussion was particularly telling about the effectiveness of the Feefo service compared to other customer feedback solutions. While the feedback response rate for B2C sites using alternative systems averages at around 4%…
The average feedback response rate with Feefo is 18%
There are a number of important reasons why this is the case. Firstly, the Feefo solution uses email to request feedback based on specific purchasing behaviour and is quick and easy for consumers to interact with. Secondly, the Feefo brand is increasingly recognised by consumers as being synonymous with integrity, honesty and impartiality.
Arguably the most significant theme of the afternoon was the crucial importance of being completely open about the feedback that’s received and publishing negative as well as positive reviews.
This is something that CEOs and Marketing Directors tend to find very counter-intuitive, which is why it’s so common to find businesses implementing draconian procedures for moderating or removing negative feedback (and even polishing the spelling and grammar of customer reviews) so that only a positive picture is painted for the outside world.
The trouble with this short-sighted approach is that it lacks credibility and integrity – particularly in the eyes of increasingly savvy online consumers. Everyone knows that retailers (online and offline) can’t get it right all the time. It’s the way they respond to complaints and deal with problems that distinguishes great service from the just so-so.
By not hiding the negative, the positive is cast in a very much more realistic and favourable light. This is especially true when the volume of customer feedback is great enough to make negative comments a very small proportion of the whole.
Feefo offers a no-obligation free trial of their feedback-gathering service for any business wishing to evaluate response rates and get a barometer of customer satisfaction.
Congratulations and thanks to Matt, Andrew, Ed and Bill for a thoroughly enjoyable and very worthwhile event.
