Feefo independent feedback

[Darren B]

And there was me thinking i was alone in wanting a separate product review system form a site / company review system.

when i want to know about a company i tend to type the site name followed by review in google. The s**t bags out there normally appear. One particular electronics company has 100's of bad reviews, this is enough for me to avoid them. Had it been one or two then i take this with a pinch of salt sometimes things go wrong we are all human.

take this review i have about a product

"kite would suit 2yr old not 4 .postage charged double the cost"

it is live on the site and i have responded, why is it live well its some ones opinion although would i let a 2 year old play with kites? and postage charges for this item is £1.95 but unfortunately people only see the cost of the postage label. the total cost of this order was £4.90 (including postage) There will always be people who have no understanding on costs of things and we will have to put up with it.

[Sean Williams]

To be honest, service reviews don't add much value to me. They might be important on ebay, where it's an auction, the DSRs don't apply, and there are plenty of scammers about. But when you buy from a company online, particularly now everyone's using a PSP, you are protected by the card companies and the DSRs so the potential loss and element of risk is tiny.

I think both are important. The service review gives a good indication of what kind of customer service one is likely to receive in the event of a problem with the product or delivery.
The only time we get proper complaints is when we make a hash of something, like despatching with a slower method than requested, or being slow to rectify supply errors or warranty, or completely omitting to process an order ( which I'm ashamed to admit we've done once or twice )

I must say I'd be wary of having off-site reviews such as Feefo - I like to have control and be able to moderate. What if somone really gives you a good slating (whether justified or not) - with Feefo that slating is stuck there for good; surely this isn't good for one's reputation as it will perpetually come up in online search?
The ability to respond isn't good enough as it won't remove the offending comments or undo the damage.

With one's own on-site reviewing, one is able to get rid of these comments, or even to moderate them.
The reality is that however even-handed and steeped in integrity one may be when moderating reviews, one's business cannot be allowed to suffer bad publicity as it will harm the business, so really bad feedback has to be moderated and/or removed.
Actinic themselves have taken this course of action on this forum in the past year and I quite understand why.

I'm with Lee - I always look for a couple of less than glowing reviews just to see if the people running the business are actually human - we all make mistakes!
It's not the making of the mistake that's the problem, it's how you as a business sort it out to the customer's satisfaction that really counts, so being able to highlight the remedial action taken by responding to a bad review is essential IMHO.

[Darren B]

Actinic themselves have taken this course of action on this forum in the past year and I quite understand why.

And applied pressure elsewere when things are not how they would like it

[Mike Hughes]

I completely agree about keeping the bad reviews. Not only do they show you're human (and the reviews are genuine) but they're also a good chance to show how you handle problems. Everyone expects some problems, it's how you follow up and resolve them that's important.

But you can also get the the extreme customer who thinks you're the devils spawn and is going to post negative reviews against all your products.

That's not acceptable and is yet another reason why I like to see product reviews and service reviews separated. They address different customer needs, require different features (such as editorial control over product reviews) and have different business drivers.

Product Reviews should be integrated into the website under the owners control. This is becoming a standard feature on ecommerce platforms so I really don't see why we're being expected to pay for this as a service on Actinic when it's actually the wrong way to do it.

Service Reviews are better when they're run independently with little room for editing. That way they achieve their objective of being an independent comment on the standards of the organisation.

Mike

[Mike Hughes]

I was just looking at FeeFo again and saw that they list Mamas and Papas as a client. I thought it would be interesting to see how they've integrated the reviews and whether it's any less clunky, but couldn't find it on their site anywhere. It wasn't in the checkout either.

It would appear that despite FeeFo saying they've been a client since May 1998, that it was only really used for Oct/Nov/Dec 08 as reviews pretty much stopped mid December. I wonder what happened there?

Ok. I just looked at Land's End, regular reviews appearing on FeeFo but no sign of it on their website. So are they just using it internally for customer feedback?

Ok. Third try. Muddy Puddles. Yes, they do have FeeFo on site with the product reviews. So that's good. I do notice their reviews aren't using the ++, -- ratings which isn't a surprise. Why FeeFo don't use 5 stars like everyone else is a shame really.

Mike

[cbarling]

As I tried to explain, Feefo tells me that the number of really unreasonable reviews that are received in practise is very, very small. In discussions, they told me that this tends to be the biggest concern with new merchants who come on board. However, after a fairly short period of time this pretty much always ceases to be a concern.

Because everyone who posts feedback has had to have bought a product, this provides a lot of protection. If we were using Feefo here, nobody would have been able to comment yet, as they haven't bought it

On product reviews versus service reviews, we did give this a fair amount of thought. We've gone for the Feefo model because it's simpler to have one route and because our customers are overwhelmingly in niches. We did take a look at Reevo which is a product focused feedback service with a different business model.

Having said all of this, I wouldn't claim to be an expert in the field. To repeat myself, I think that it will be interesting once some real life experience arrives. In the mean time, I will try to get someone from Feefo to comment, as they will bring more information than I can.

Chris

[Jan]

I quite like the idea of feefo simply because you know that you can't fiddle the reviews, I'm not too worried about negative reviews because I'd rather know than not know TBH and presumably I can then also contact the customers to resolve the issue.

It looks like Actinic customers are going to get a pretty keen price as well, compared to the listed website prices, which is nice.

I've already got a review system on my site build from Actinic design technology but I don't find that many people use it - even though I know that people do like my products (they prefer to call and tell me, which is nice). How will using Feefo encourage people to actually write the product reviews?

Regards,

[george]

Having said all of this, I wouldn't claim to be an expert in the field. To repeat myself, I think that it will be interesting once some real life experience arrives. In the mean time, I will try to get someone from Feefo to comment, as they will bring more information than I can.

Cheers for the honest answer.

[Darren B]

IMHO - not that this seems to count for anything

Product reviews are best displayed on the website and should never be restricted to someone that purchased only? You want information from people who have actually used the product for some period of time. Take argos for example, there review system is pretty good again IMHO it has crap and good reviews.

There is normally 100's of sites selling the same products as you (well probably for more than 80% of the products to be found on ecommerce sites) if you have used a product and you were unhappy about it, you would tell people, this has nothing to do with the company that sold it, not directly anyway.

Company / service reviews should be an external review method that is not directly under the control of the merchant, these are nothign to do with the product. I do not understand why people think these should be lumped together. Perhaps im missing the point here?

But all this seems to me is that this has been chucked in to try an plug a hole without any real thought or understanding of what people require. If i want to know how good or bad a company is i look them up on http://www.reviewcentre.com/ and yes they have product reviews but these come from jo public not from sites.

It feels theres lots of listening going on and very little notice being taken, perhpas andy from codepath would care to comment on how succesfull his plugin is, this would give you and understanding of demand for something that is fast becomming a standard feature these days.

[george]

Daz, have a browse through this site starting with this product...

http://www.aspace.co.uk/product_cata...136-x-132-1263

[leehack]

Daz, have a browse through this site starting with this product...

http://www.aspace.co.uk/product_cata...136-x-132-1263

That example page seems seriously arse upwards to me. I'm reviewing everything but what I want at that stage. When buying a product who cares what someone else thinks about the site navigation, layout and colours?

Product reviews (which often get service reviews tagged in anyway) on product pages. Site or service reviews on any other page for me.

[Darren B]

the title says product review

the review says service, sorry red and green markers seems a little to much "YES NO" and in my world there are always grey areas, its common across the industry to use ratings involving 5 levels of scoring, wether it be numbers or stars. If you want to go with traffic lights then obviously you use 3 levels ratings.

IMHO G that site actually tells me nothing about the products that is easily found

[Darren B]

Im guessing none of the questions i have asked through this thread and others are going to be answered Chris?

hasta la vista

[george]

I've had a number of uploads and snapshots to do today so spent a fair bit of time browsing sites that have feefo reviews. I wont bore you with the links but most of the sites I've seen do have very high postive marks although I didnt notice any nonsense or nasty feedback (although one chap did get his order wrong seven times apparently).

There seems to be different ways of having the feefo review comments shown and in some sites it does all look a bit uncomfortable (for want of a better word) within the product page although, this could be a point, the fact that it is external could well be more suited than being `blended in` with the rest of the site when you'd maybe then lose that `independent view` feeling.

Some sites do look very untidy as the retailers comments box on the right hand site of the review page is more often than not left empty and I think the layout of this could be improved.

The two green, one green, one red, two red awards are a little bizarre compared to a simple one to five star system. Its a universal language that the world understands, why complicate it for the sake of being different or unique?

I've never really studied customer reviews with a view to using them myself so its been an interesting wee topic to look at since it was mentioned last week. I look forward to seeing other peoples questions and comments on the options available.

[cbarling]

Give me a chance Darren.

I asked the appropriate guy from Feefo first thing this morning to take a look at the thread and post some responses, within minutes of posting that I would do on this thread. Unfortunately he told me that he was tied up all day so he couldn't get to it straight away. I would hope for some answers by close of business tomorrow at the latest, although that's not been promised.

I don't want to comment any more myself because I don't think that I will add much more value at this stage.

The guy who will comment is called Ed Lennox.

Chris