In the last few years I’ve used a variety of customer feedback systems. Some were highly functional packaged solutions requiring considerable investment of financial and technical resources. Others were bespoke developments, unique to the requirements of individual businesses. One way or another, they’ve all been based around the theme of customer “ratings and reviews” and all offer the same fundamental benefits: powerful peer-to-peer recommendations that increase sales, improved customer service and SEO-enhancing user-generated content. However, the one that continues to impress me most is Feefo, an award-winning solution described as the “independent honest feedback service“. Founded in 2006 and headquartered in London, the company has an international client-base that’s growing fast. Their success is well-deserved, as one of their clients highlights:

Probably the greatest tool we have discovered for service improvement has been Feefo, which we use to solicit feedback from our online customers. This allows us to react personally, proportionally and purposefully to any issues our customers find, and to spot any positive or negative trends in our business.

There are four key reasons why we recommend Feefo to Propeller’s clients:

1) Feefo is highly cost-effective

The full service only costs £499 per month, with £299 and £99 smaller-scale options available. There’s also a free trial of the service to allow businesses to test the water with off-site feedback results before deciding which package is appropriate to their needs.

2) Feefo is simple to implement

Displaying customer feedback is achieved by adding just four lines of code to every relevant page of a site (with a variable for product identification).

3) Feefo uses email to invite feedback

Rather than asking for feedback immediately after checkout, or relying on voluntary feedback submissions in later site visits, Feefo emails customers to invite their feedback once they’ve received their goods. The customer data can be supplied to Feefo automatically via an “auto-notify” script or in batches in spreadsheet format. This method ensures that feedback is only from genuine customers.

4) Feefo provides Google Seller Ratings integration

Simple integration with Google’s star ratings, displayed as enhancements to Adwords ads, has a significant impact on improving click-through rates, Google Quality Score, and overall conversion rates. However, the benefits of using a customer feedback system come from what you do with all the data that gets collected. It needs to be engaged with and thoroughly understood. It needs to guide customer service and user experience optimisation. And it needs to add-value to website content in an honest and transparent way. The payback on using a system like Feefo can be considerable: [list_wrap] [list_item icon=”%”]

Consumers trust user generated content more than any other form of advertising

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Profits can increase by as much as 15%

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Conversion rates can treble

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Returns can decrease by as much as 15%

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You get to hear from customers who wouldn’t normally find their voice

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Staff gain a great deal of motivation when they see good feedback about them

[/list_item] [/list_wrap] The White Company is another Feefo client and its founder, Chris Rucker, is clear about the commercial benefits of using the service:

Any online business that cares about their customer service and reputation should be a member of Feefo. It has made a profound impact to our operational focus, our service delivery experience and the way in which we measure our own performance internally. We use Feefo every single day, it gives us an immediate and direct insight into how our products are performing and how our customers feel about customer service.

To explore how your business can profit from an independent customer feedback solution, visit the Feefo site and sign-up for their free trial.

A client’s recent website navigation re-structuring project provided an interesting demonstration of how the consumption of site content can be heavily influenced by external links.

An essential part of the project was the analysis of traffic performance and visitor behaviour using Google Analytics. The site in question serves a genuinely global audience and is recognised as the leading online resource in its niche. Partly because of the geographical spread of its users, the site’s traffic volumes are completely unaffected by seasonality and visitor behaviour is very unusually consistent. The quantitative analysis of visitor behaviour provided an objective basis for key decisions about re-engineering the site’s navigation and gave the client a much greater insight into the way their content was being consumed. One of the more unexpected findings came from an analysis of the most popular sections of the site’s discussion forum. By quite a significant margin, the two most visited sections related to very specialist niche topics. At first glance this seemed completely counter-intuitive. However, when considered in the context of the top referring sites (i.e. other websites linking to the client site and sending visitors to it), it became clear that the overall impression of “popular content” was being distorted by just a couple of external links. This is what I call Content Link Sensitivity. Fortunately, the external linking sites were highly respected and were delivering visitors with very well-qualified interest in the two areas of discussion. When planning a significant change to a site’s navigation and organisation of content, it’s vitally important to look at the full picture of visitor behaviour. For example, if the client data about most popular content had been taken at face value, the relative prominence of different sections within the navigation would have been completely inappropriate to the majority of visitors. The referring site information ensured that everything was kept in proper perspective. Thinking about the impact of external links in a broader sense, the client example also highlights that there can sometimes be a chicken and egg dilemma to resolve about content strategy: Should a site try to create content in order to generate incoming links (for the benefit of SEO and traffic volume)? Or should it generate content in reaction to the demand created by external sites?

In practice, both tactics are valid and the best results will be achieved with a combined approach that’s intelligently integrated with other digital marketing activity.

Earlier today we retweeted a link to an excellent blog post by Econsultancy that highlights how John Lewis has used best practice to help achieve astonishing ecommerce growth.

The full article, entitled 14 reasons behind John Lewis’ 44% increase in online sales, is well worth a read by anyone with an interest in improving their digital marketing and ecommerce performance in particular. Describing how ecommerce now represents a quarter of all John Lewis sales, with over £800m worth of products being ordered online last December alone, it looks at some of promotional tactics and usability factors that contribute to the brand’s ecommerce success. John Lewis has provided a useful benchmark for ecommerce best practice for a number of years. In fact the brand often crops-up in conversations with clients about interface and navigation design. By reaping the benefits of on-going testing and refinement, what John Lewis does so profitably is focus on ease of use, conversion rate optimisation and thorough channel integration. Intuitive and efficient navigation is always a major challenge for retail sites, especially those with product ranges as large and diverse as a business like John Lewis. The solution that’s proved effective is clarity and consistency of top-level navigation, with extensive drop-down sub-menus, and a powerful product search function. The combination significantly reduces the number of clicks required to find and view individual products, it’s a simple way to highlight the breadth of the product range, and it has a direct influence on improving conversion rates. Content-rich product pages, featuring customer reviews and clear calls-to-action, together with a straightforward checkout process are essential. Another, perhaps less obvious, example of best practice that’s employed to great effect by John Lewis is removing unnecessary distractions from the checkout. It’s a tactic developed through experimentation and quantitative analysis of customer behaviour. Search engine optimisation (SEO) and intelligently-targeted pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, mobile applications, personlised email marketing campaigns, and the close integration of online and in-store services (such as “Click and Collect”) also play important parts in the overall story of ecommerce success. While not every retailer has the marketing or development budgets to match those of brands like John Lewis, and not every online operation concerned with conversions is a retailer, the best practices they demonstrate can be exploited by any business to improve customer experience, brand loyalty and ecommerce profitability.