Customer feedback / Feefo

[lessharma]

Hi,

On v10 with Customer feedback using Feefo do we know the price for this? What are the Feefo prices / Actinic set-up? Has Actinic done any deals with Feefo for discount?

From Feefo site....

1. Feefo 50 - For small business (turnover up to £1m p/a) Up to £50 per month.
Even as a small business, you will have access to the full Feefo reporting tools and systems. The most you will pay in any calendar month is £50 (even if you receive 500 Feebs in a single month!) but if you receive fewer than 50 Feebs, you still only pay £1.00 for each piece of valuable customer feedback you receive.

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

Chris Barling posted the planned pricing back in October, see here: Feefo Pricing

Or I have copied it below:

Actinic has selected to provide independent feedback from Feefo. The currently planned pricing is as follows:

£30 sign-up fee.

Monthly fee based on the number of orders each month for which feedback is requested:

Up to 350 Orders / month - £10 / month, excess orders at 10p/order;
Up to 800 Orders / month - £20 / month, excess orders at 10p/order;
Up to 2,000 Orders / month - £40 / month, excess orders at 10p/order;
Up to 5,000 Orders / month - £80 / month, excess orders at 4p/order

Chris

[cbarling]

The introductory price with Actinic (which will be held for at least 18 months) for everyone signing up before July are (each with £30 sign up):
- £10 per month for up to 350 orders, then 10p per order thereafter
- £20 per month for up to 800 orders. then 10p per order and so on

Prices are based on the number of orders (rather than the number of pieces of feedback - "Feebs") so the pricing is predictable. The prices are substantially less than direct from Feefo, because there are big efficiency savings from the sales, provisioning, technical support and technical integration across the large Actinic customer base.

Our policy is always to share the savings with our customers - see also Actinic Payments and Postcode Anywhere, and there should be more in the future.

Chris

[guccij]

I'm confused (yes, I know, this happens often).

If it's based on the number of orders rather than er, Feebs (can't hardly type that without sniggering - it sounds like a bad children's TV programme), how does Feefo know how many orders any particular site is processing? Is it based on how many emails are sent to potential reviewers?

Because a busy site is going to get walloped at that sort of pricing, even with the discount.

And, I'm not sure I want a third party to know how many orders we're doing.

[cbarling]

The Actinic pricing is based on the number of orders that will be solicited for feedback by Feefo. So for instance if you don't pass across MOTO orders (because you don't normally capture email addresses), these wouldn't be included in the count. The pricing is much lower than competitors and works out about half the cost of a PSP per order. I guess each merchant has to decide on the value to them.

Feefo can't send the email soliciting the feedback without getting the order, so that's unavoidable. Believe me though Feefo are sticklers for proper convention, data protection etc.

Actinic v10 automatically passes the necessary order details to Feefo from the desktop, you just configure it in Actinic.

The orders are passed automatically to Feefo after the order download process, but you control how long after the order is either made or completed that they get passed to Feefo. For instance, if you set the delay to 5 days after completion, any order will only get passed to Feefo 5 days after it has been marked as completed in Actinic.

Feefo have been going a number of years so the wrinkles in the system have mostly been ironed out. Lands End, Charles Tyrwhitt and Fat Face all use the system and there's a lot more in the pipeline, including hopefully some major, major brands.

Chris

[guccij]

Thanks Chris. I'll do the math now.

[pinbrook]

The orders are passed automatically to Feefo after the order download process, but you control how long after the order is either made or completed that they get passed to Feefo. For instance, if you set the delay to 5 days after completion, any order will only get passed to Feefo 5 days after it has been marked as completed in Actinic.

So if you buy 800 feebs for £20 per month, you can easily control it so you keep within the limit and not pay excess?

Say for example you had 1000 orders in a month, how easy would it be to exclude 200 of them? can you filter so you exclude a certain criteria ie location, product, order value?

[Mike Hughes]

Say for example you had 1000 orders in a month, how easy would it be to exclude 200 of them? can you filter so you exclude a certain criteria ie location, product, order value?

I don't think that's the idea. You can set the criteria for when the orders get passed to Feefo but not whether individual orders do or not.

If they allowed you to do that then you could exclude orders that might get a 'poor' review (if delivered late, or you sent the wrong item, or the customer wasn't happy with the courier, etc, etc)

Mike

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

So if you buy 800 feebs for £20 per month, you can easily control it so you keep within the limit and not pay excess?

Say for example you had 1000 orders in a month, how easy would it be to exclude 200 of them?

I don't think that would work because it states that "excess orders at 10p/order"

[cbarling]

You don't buy feebs with Actinic's version of Feefo, it's based on total orders. Mike is right, part of the agreement is that you don't exclude any orders other than choosing whether MOTO are included or not.

It's important to get as much feedback as possible, as then the volume of good stuff easily drowns out the bad. I think that this is where Feefo excels. Their response rates are much higher than I would have expected, an average of 17% with worst at 9% and best at 30%.

The reviews of Feefo by Feefo's customers say it all. They've had a churn rate (lost customers) themselves of less than 1% in the total time from inception, which was 2006.

Chris

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

Is it easy to change from one price band to another, is this automatic or a manual request, as I can see the costs getting high if you go over the month limit and start to pay 10p per order (equating to 59 per feeb, based on a 17% response rate).

Can you also start and stop using the service for a few months at a time or would you be faced with another sign-up fee?
If you stop using the service will the previous reviews still be viewable or will they vanish?

It also works out more expensive per feeb for small sites with less than 100 orders per month.

Based on a 17% response rate (and being in the correct band each month) the cost per feeb work out as:

50 Orders - 8-9 feebs - £1.18 per feeb
100 Orders - 17 feebs - 59p per feeb
150 Orders - 25 feebs - 39p per feeb
200 Orders - 34 feebs - 29p per feeb
300 Orders - 51 feebs - 20p per feeb
400 Orders - 68 feebs - 22p per feeb
500 Orders - 85 feebs - 24p per feeb
800 Orders - 136 feebs - 15p per feeb
1000 Orders - 170 feebs - 24p per feeb
2000 Orders - 340 feebs - 12p per feeb

The price per feeb would largely depend on your response rate eg. for 300 orders in 1 month the cost per feeb would be 37p @ 9% or only 11p @ 30% response rate.

[cbarling]

Is it easy to change from one price band to another, is this automatic or a manual? ?

It will initailly be done manually by Actinic and we will speak to anyone who will get a better price by upgrading before we charge them.

Can you also start and stop using the service for a few months at a time or would you be faced with another sign-up fee?

There would be another sign up fee. It costs us money. See also the point on 3 months free orders below.

If you stop using the service will the previous reviews still be viewable or will they vanish?.

The reviews will be retained by Feefo for a period, and will probably be available, but that can't be guaranteed if no payment is being made for the service.

It also works out more expensive per feeb for small sites with less than 100 orders per month.

I think Feefo will work less well for companies with a small number of orders as they will get a low amount of feedback, possibly below critical mass. Having said that, every merchant signing up can submit the last 3 months orders on feedback for no charge. It's done by a single click of a button.

I guess time will tell on the effectiveness for small merchants. We really can't go much below the stated price level else the sales, setup and support costs will outweigh the revenue. A foreign competitor of Feefo called me a few weeks ago and their prices were on the same sort of model but 4x our introductory price.

Chris

[chris ashdown]

Quite honestly i dont like the idea, i think my larger organisations would never subscribe to filling in a response form but individuals who were discruntled would giving a biased view of the company,

For instance we give 14 days to return rather than the DRS 7 days and also 30 days to exchange.

We do get customers who get really upset that they cannot exchange or return after 6 weeks of so and nearly always for a item under about £15.00, if they were a large customer buying a few thousand a year we do bend the rules, but we are in business to make money not give it away. you can bet these people would love a letter to them asking how good we were!!!

[cbarling]

I think its horses for courses, Chris. Independent feedback doesn't work for everybody, possibly depending on the customer mix but definitely depending on the blood pressure of the site owner

The one point worth making is that highly disgruntled people will tend to broadcast their views anyway. There are now loads of channels to do this starting at Twitter and going on endlessly. Encouraging such feedback to come through an independent review system means:
- you know about it
- you have the right to reply, and the reply will be shown along side the criticism
- if it's actually defamatory or factually incorrect it can be edited (by Feefo)

Having said that, the current editing rate is running at around 1 in 45,000, so not a big problem. Feefo has some sophisticated methods for eliminating profanity, and attempts to bypass the checks.

The big benefit of being independent is that people trust the system more and are much more willing to provide feedback (hence the very high response rates).

However, as I said, I don't think it works for everybody.

Chris

[Mike Hughes]

Chris, you're making a valid point. A feefo type service won't be ideal for everyone. It is good though for websites wanting to demonstrate a trusted reputation with new customers.

On the late returns aspect, there are ways of addressing it and as CB says, the idea is that the mass of good reviews offset the few bad ones. Most people know you can't get things right every time and I suspect there's a number (probably in the 85 - 95% region) where the good reviews are enough to convince new customers that they're more likely to have a positive experience rather than a bad one.

In your case you could consider getting the review request sent out 7 days after dispatch. This would avoid battles with the 'late' returners and could also prompt those who are unhappy with what they've got, but haven't got around to returning it yet, to get a move on and correct the problem before it's too late.

Mike