Good reasons to post customer reviews on your site
By Douglas Gantenbein
Today's customers are putting less trust in corporate marketing messages and becoming more influenced by recommendations from other people, surveys show. Customer reviews — customer opinions on products or services that companies publish on their Web sites — are now widely read. With the right execution, companies can use customer reviews to improve results across the board, from marketing to product development.
In Summary:
| • | Online reviews are an excellent way to let customers share their positive stories about products and services. |
| • | Even negative reviews offer a benefit by improving the credibility of other reviews. |
| • | Online reviews help boost sales and give companies new insight into what customers really want. |
For example, customers visiting Burpee.com, the Web site for the famed seed and garden store W. Atlee Burpee & Co., can choose among thousands of vegetable, flower, and herb seeds and starts, along with garden gear and tips. And now, customers can also tell each other about their experiences with Burpee products.
"My favorite garden tomato ever!" writes an enthusiastic customer from Washington state in a review posted on the Burpee.com page for that tomato. Adds a pepper-loving Wisconsin gardener: "Excellent germination rates, heavy yield, great flavor and for a Jalapeno the heat can't be beat."
Burpee — like many companies that market exclusively on the Web or use the Internet to complement traditional sales — has found that by asking customers to comment on its products and services, and making those reviews available to anyone shopping on its site, it can leverage the most potent marketing tool at its disposal: its own customers.
Increasingly, customers see online reviews as a "must-have" when visiting an e-commerce site, says Andy Chen, co-founder of the online-review provider PowerReviews. "Today, people will visit a site with online reviews and stay away from one that doesn't have them," he says.
That is in large part because surveys show that many customers are giving less credence to corporate marketing messages while becoming more receptive to other consumers' recommendations. A recent Edelman survey, for instance, showed that the trust consumers had in "a person like me" soared to 68 percent in 2006 from 20 percent in 2003.
But making the most of online reviews means more than simply allowing customers to post comments. See these tips below on how to engender customer feedback and present a positive image to your reviewers.
 | Part of the review process involves the reviewer's ego. The other part is in customers looking for people they can identify with. |  | | Sam Decker
Bazaarvoice | |
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Tips to attract and understand online reviewers
If your company is new to online reviews, you need to find ways to encourage customers to review products early and often. Petco gave its online reviews a jump-start by automatically entering every reviewer into a sweepstakes for a $100 gift certificate. That boosted submissions by 800 percent compared with the initial rate of review submissions, says John Lazarchic, vice president of e-commerce at Petco.
It also pays to understand the psychology of those who write and read online reviews. "Part of the review process involves the reviewer's ego," notes Sam Decker, vice president of marketing with Bazaarvoice, an online-review provider that works with Burpee, Petco, CompUSA, and other companies. "The other part is in customers looking for people they can identify with." For the reviewers, it's a chance to appear knowledgeable, to tout a product they've "discovered," and maybe even to brag about their prowess at golf or cooking or gardening, he says.
Give reviewers space to talk a little about themselves, their interests, and their self-described expertise level related to the topic. And don't discard negative reviews, Decker says, because they reassure customers that the reviews are honest and unfiltered. (Allowing only positive reviews to be published can tarnish your company's credibility and lead to potential public relations problems.)
That said, you should monitor content for potentially inappropriate or offensive commentary. Holding reviewers accountable by requiring them to log in with a username and password helps reduce problems.
Use reviews to reach out to customers
There are a number of ways a company can analyze and leverage review traffic. Tools such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM enable you to automate and simplify the task of tracking customer behavior and expedite the creation of targeted e-mail and other marketing efforts. For instance, Microsoft Dynamics CRM can analyze how much money frequent reviewers spend with your company or what products are most or least highly rated.
Through its own reviews system, Petco flags reviews left by unhappy customers. That information is relayed to its customer service representatives, who may attempt to solve the customer's problem or address their complaint.
Petco also watches which products are most highly rated by customers, then displays those products prominently on its home page. People who view its top-rated products list order them 35 percent more often, and spend 40 percent more per order, than customers who come across the same products via other paths, according to Bazaarvoice.
Petco also has improved response to e-mail ads by including top-rated products. E-mails that link to highly rated products have a click-through rate that is 200 percent higher than e-mails that do not, according to Bazaarvoice.
Improve products, merchandising with review insights
The insight that online reviews provide to retailers extends to merchandising and even product development. Allsop, a Bellingham, Wash., company that makes computer and office accessories, found that reviewers of one of its mouse pads praised it as an aid to serious gaming. So Allsop suggested to retailers that they place mouse pads near gaming joysticks — a move that has boosted sales.
Allsop also has used reviews to correct problems with packaging that customers complained about, and to fix a manufacturing problem when one of two suppliers wasn't quite hitting the mark. "Reviews have been a great tool for us," says Jeff Lechtanski, Allsop's marketing director.
Performance Inc., a North Carolina-based retailer of bicycles, bicycle accessories, and apparel, meanwhile, uses reviews to improve its house-branded products. While other companies often market house-brand products primarily on the basis of their lower price versus "name brand" items, Performance has positioned its products based on a combination of features, performance and price. Direct feedback on these items is helping Performance merchandisers better understand how to improve house-brand products to meet customers' needs.
Getting started with online customer reviews
The good news for midsize companies is that there are cost-effective solutions available to manage and analyze online reviews. Previously, only large enterprises such as Amazon.com, which has pioneered customer reviews, had the technical resources and staff levels to set up and monitor review sites.
Performance tried to manage online reviews on its Internet store four years ago, but gave up. "It was expensive, it was hard to keep up with, and we got sabotaged by competitors," says Stuart Westland, Performance's marketing director. The company now uses review tools supplied by PowerReviews.
In addition to providing the technology and servers to drive the review engines, outsourcing companies such as Bazaarvoice and PowerReviews design filters that catch posts using prohibited words or phrases, or that flag visitors who post frequent negative reviews.
PowerReviews provides its services for free in exchange for using reviews on its own shopping research portal. Bazaarvoice and other online-review specialists follow a more traditional pricing structure. A typical installation runs about $2,000 a month.
Douglas Gantenbein writes often on technology for Microsoft. A journalist for more than 20 years, his work has appeared in Business 2.0, Scientific American, Popular Science and other magazines.
