The truth is that customer reviews are as important as products descriptions. Why? Because, this two parts together complete the loop of customer purchasing. The first need, of course, is to know WHAT you are buying (description, images help), the next need is to know IF it is a good purchase and will suit your needs (reviews fill this needs). Both are essential to the shopping process. For organizations what one need to do is providing chance for customers to do the word of mouth message transformation in many ways to express their enthusiasm toward the products. And also react, based on customers feeling, and your reaction would tell your customers you care about their opinions, this would very helpful for the future business. And in Groundswell , it calls " energizing groundswell"
From The chart in left, it is very clear to tell that how important the customers reviews is, because that is the place where business happens. Opinions of a friends or acquaintance, but it is hard to control, and not easily to acknowledge of. However, for the review and ratings of the product, it is something organizations have control and can act with. There are a lot of ways to do so, but all in all, making your customers talking like own home. We all know that, people may act as different roles in different situation, if the company offer a warm, and free place to customers where is like a home, they would become soft and also more enthusiastic toward the products. The other side is , if the organization do not care about customers' opinion, and strictly about their opinions, the customers would arm up, and ready to fight, for a company this would be a nightmare.
This two pictures are the screenshots from L.L.Bean.
They used a lot of way to make the customer reviews useful, they use star ratings, content review, chart, and also they give other customers to judge the usefulness of the comment. All these words, numbers make the single review page become a community. People would become more serious about their review, since other customers can judge it. For L.L Bean, this is really good, become their customer kind of self-monitoring each others.
In this video,we fell how and in what extent the groundswell can work for an organization.
Provide your customers with a community, let them talk, listen to them, act and provide feedback to them. Then the customers know that they are cared by you, not only now but also will be the same in the future. In this way the groundswell become your eternal friends.
Laurity, it's interesting how you compare a company's review site to being invited into someone's home. By welcoming customers into its "home," the company expects a measure of good behavior. While a responsive company won't delete negative comments (unless they are offensive), it can assume the visitors will at least be polite. You're right: L.L. Bean is great at this.
ReplyDeleteHi Jim, it is always hard for companies to decide whether control or not about their sites, since bad comments may damage their reputation, while the interesting thing is that some companies can earn more reputation through the reaction towards the bad comments, like Body Form's reaction towards the bad comments from a person named Richard on their Facebook page. It is really interesting how they react with the people come to their "home" and may be not that polite.
Delete