FeeFo - what are your thoughts

[Pet Dispensary]

Hi
I am considering using FeeFo for my site www.petdispensary.co.uk, just would appreciate any comments good or bad about how this is working for others.

Many thanks
Lynsey

[Jan]

It has worked very well for us. We ran a passive feedback system for 2 years beforehand and had more reviews in a day with feefo that we had with that one. When you install it, it canvasses all purchases from the last 30 days for feedback to get the ball rolling. We got somewhere between 30 and 40 replies.

Our feefo page is here :

http://www.feefo.com/reviews/Mole-En...w.mole-end.biz

We have had a few negative reviews but it's better in a way to know that people are unhappy and we have improved our service because of it - it's very frustrating though when people post a bad review that goes like - it's all rubbish - and then refuse to tell you what they don't like because then you can't change anything.

We did have a terrible review from a person whose main complaint was that we didn't send them a lifetimes supply of Avery label paper with their Avery label report but we were able (after a bit of a fight) to get that review removed because it was clearer unfair and inaccurate.

You can't control what people say but you can always answer (and you can close the threads whenever you like as well).

After you have signed up you get a monthly invoice from Actinic telling you that that your service has been renewed which I find quite annoying.

I'm a feefo fan but I don't use it on all of my sites because I worry about competitors placing bad reviews - they would have to purchase product to do so but would then be free to post negative reviews. I'm paranoid though and have some unscrupulous competitors.

Regards,

[leehack]

Thanks for the info Jan, very helpful. About time we had some reviews on the service, so a good idea for a thread. I've hardly heard a thing about it, i have one customer using it that I know of, not sure if that indicates low take up or people are just happy with it.

[JimboS]

I did look at this when Actinic first said it was available.

We use the Soapbox plug-in from Codepath, not sure people would consider this exactly the same but certainly a lot more cost effective and easier to remove unfairly critical comments. So we have stuck with that.

James

[Sean Williams]

We use the Soapbox plug-in from Codepath, not sure people would consider this exactly the same but certainly a lot more cost effective and easier to remove unfairly critical comments.

Which is what decided us - can't bear the thought of not being able to edit the crazies and don't want to have to waste time fighting with FeeFo for removal like Jan had to.

[Jan]

Which is what decided us - can't bear the thought of not being able to edit the crazies and don't want to have to waste time fighting with FeeFo for removal like Jan had to.

I think that the key advantage of Feefo is that on the whole you can't easily hide bad reviews. It means that people can trust what they read.

The other thing that is good about feefo is the email that is sent out, it's very well written and I thought it was worded in a way that encourages you to reply. I don't have a copy of it here ATM but if any of my customers want to post a copy of theirs it might be useful.

Regards,

[TraceyHand]

I think that the key advantage of Feefo is that on the whole you can't easily hide bad reviews. It means that people can trust what they read.

Do customers reading it know that though?

I mean, if a product has no bad reviews, would a potential customer think "there's obviously nothing bad about it" or "they've obviously taken away any bad reviews"?

The customer wouldn't know, without investigating (which, let's face it, no one would do) the difference, would they?

[Jan]

If I saw a list of reviews with all glowing reviews, I would just assume that they were all made up to be honest.

I did think about that point when I posted my previous comment and thought that most people wouldn't know what feefo was, I think that this will change and they can also find out what it is by clicking on the links through to feefo.

Regards,

[Darren B]

Thanks for you comments Jan

there has been items on the TV about reviews and how credible they are, from memory i think it was a number of leading high street brands that were found to have been creating suspect reviews.

Although i do like the idea of external review systems that cant be edited, thats why i have shopzilla and GC, i still feel we need a built in product review system.

I really dont see how these can be lumped together, a product review is about exactly that - and many products can be brought from more than one outlet but your actual customer service is the key to most customers and as such i agree needs to be externaly regulated.

Wether feefo or any other company is right i personally feel is down to the user to chose what suits there business model.

I would be interested to here from others though, Jan you are the only one i have heard of using it

[cbarling]

The take up of Feefo has been slow but fairlly steady since we introduced it. Generally, it seems to have gone down well with merchants who have used it.

Actinic are going to make a bit of a push on Feefo in the near future as the introductory pricing is going to end - but we will honour the very low pricing for 18 months afterwards. We're also talking to a number of users to get their experiences documented as part of that push. More details to follow.

Overall, we're pretty happy with having introduced Feefo. It seems to work well and Feefo themselves are slowly growing their market penetration, independent of Actinic.

But I'm not an independent source of information

Chris

[Feefo-Bill]

We (feefo) have now received over a million feedbacks, and I do not know of any instance of a competitor writing a bad review. We would certainly remove such a review if asked, and any publicity would reflect very badly on your competitor.

Feefo stands or falls on whether the reader recognises the reviews as honest - that's why I started it. There's no better way of showing your business integrity.

[Jan]

We (feefo) have now received over a million feedbacks, and I do not know of any instance of a competitor writing a bad review. We would certainly remove such a review if asked, and any publicity would reflect very badly on your competitor.

Feefo stands or falls on whether the reader recognises the reviews as honest - that's why I started it. There's no better way of showing your business integrity.

It's difficult to police, any competitor can purchase an item from a website and so will then receive a review request and can then enter a bad review. We wouldn't know that review came from a competitor. Our competitors have behaved badly and even illegally to gain a competitive edge over us in the past, so it's too big a risk for me (this is another site I run, not Mole End). I would like to think that this is an usual situation though. I'm very pleased with the feefo performance on Mole End, it's worked very well for us.

Regards,

[leehack]

We (feefo) have now received over a million feedbacks, and I do not know of any instance of a competitor writing a bad review.

I think that's the point, if they do it cleverly enough, you never will know. With one million feedbacks, it would be a statistical impossibility for some of them not to be 100% genuine.

[Pet Dispensary]

thanks for all the feedback - some concerns now though over the product reviews, we sell pet medication and I suppose if a product doesn't work for one animal it wouldn't mean it wouldn't be suitable for another. Negative feedback though could turn people away. Do you know of any other Feedback software that is easily adaptable with Actinic where you have a little more control over what is written. I do like the idea of independent feedback for our customer service and website but think need to be very careful on product reviews.
Also, if there is negative feedback which is underhand how easy is it to get this removed?
thanks
Lynsey

[leehack]

Look at 'soapbox' provided by Codepath if you want full control.