Link
https://www.trustpilot.com
Specifications
Trustpilot provides a global online open-review community – in multiple languages– for e-commerce businesses. Features include custom, automated emails to invite customers to leave reviews, as well as custom, automated follow-up emails for customers who have abandoned shopping carts or made purchases.
The platform also provides clients with real-time customer review analytics; a custom profile page; embeddable widgets called TrustBoxes that display reviews on retailers’websites in real time; the ability to publicly respond to customer reviews; native integration tools for Facebook and Twitter; and more.
Cost
Starts at $249 per month.
Josh Lipton, VP of technology and customer experience team leader at SpareFoot, has been using Trustpilot since late 2013.
How do you use it?
We gather customer reviews by integrating Trustpilot’s Automatic Feedback Service into our reservation flow. When someone completes a reservation online or by phone, the service triggers a template email that solicits a review. We then integrate those reviews, which Trustpilot calls review badges, into our website.
Internally, we leverage Trustpilot’s notification tools to distribute key review information based on certain criteria to people across SpareFoot who can act on that information.
For example, if we get a one-star review, we’ve configured Trustpilot to email a specific address we set up. That address sits on top of Salesforce, and Salesforce then creates a ticket for a special group within our Amazing Customer Experience team that dedicates some of their time to addressing those issues.
We use Trustpilot’s API to load all review data into our internal databases. This allows us to create a relationship between the review and the reservation it was tied to, so we can correlate review data to all the other things that happen around a reservation. This gives us a robust view of customer experience and of how reviews – positive or negative– impact what we’re trying to accomplish as a business.
We haven’t experienced any issues with Trustpilot. Everything has been very stable. If we want to understand how to better use the platform or solve some particular challenge we have, we can email or call the customer service team.
How does it serve your business needs?
SpareFoot’s mission is to make it as easy as possible for people to find and book self-storage units. We don’t manage the storage facilities. We sit in the middle of the facilities and the consumer.
It’s a challenge to figure out how to get customer satisfaction data at the right moment in time so you can improve the right elements of your product. At SpareFoot, we need to know how customers found their experience of finding and reserving a unit.
Trustpilot is very focused on using its third-party power to solicit consumer reviews. Consumers are much more likely to provide a review of us when we let a third party contain those reviews.
The platform gives us a clear customer touch point immediately after the reservation experience when they’re able to provide specific information about finding and reserving a storage space. That’s really valuable to us.
Data from Trustpilot is the most direct way of informing us how consumers perceive SpareFoot versus how they perceive the storage facility. That’s a very critical distinction for us. The experience of finding and booking a storage space is different from the later experience a consumer has with the storage facility. We have a wider net that we use to gather reviews about the facilities that’s not tied to our Trustpilot efforts.
We have more than Trustpilot 10,000 reviews now. We have used that data to identify four things that our most satisfied customers said they most loved about SpareFoot. Mining that data helped us establish our core brand pillars, and it validates that our customers care about what we thought they cared about.
Passing review content to internal product teams who build SpareFoot’s online and experiences, and overall broader customer experience, informs us as to what’s working and what needs improvement.
More often than not, our product teams are most interested in what went wrong. Though we have very high customer experience scores, our product teams want to hone in on negative experiences to find out how we can avoid them in the future. This customer experience data directly informs our product and gives us an opportunity to have internal conversations about whether an issue represents a new challenge or if it’s a something we’re already planning on improving.
One of our missions is to deliver unexpected joy to our customers. The best way to know we’re achieving that is to see validation of it in reviews. So Trustpilot reviews are an ongoing source of encouragement for our employees.
How does it integrate with your existing infrastructure from an IT standpoint?
Integration is very easy. Our marketing team at SpareFoot led the set-up. Our development team did get involved in integrating the API elements, but it didn’t require too much effort on our side.
What are the main benefits? ?
The percentage of consumers who provide reviews has been excellent. Trustpilot has really built confidence among consumers that it is a place where their reviews matter.
Reviews are only as good as your ability to tie them back into your data, and Trustpilot helps make that very easy. Discovery and learning are very straightforward.
Trustpilot employees have invested time in understanding SpareFoot’s business, so they’re an asset to us.
What are the main drawbacks?
When you start pulling reviews, you’re essentially contracting with the consumer that you’re going to do something about it, so you have to be prepared for that level of transparency. You have to commit to surfacing this information, doing something with it, and responding to what is happening.
This hasn’t been a drawback for us because transparency is core to our company, but it is a risk for some companies.
What would you like to see improved/added in terms of functionality?
Trustpilot has some features related to automated data mining of review content that are in the beta stage now, and we’re really excited about them.
I’d love to see deeper integration with Salesforce, and I know this is on Trustpilot’s roadmap.
Competitors
Bazaarvoice: Provides a suite of applications to capture, manage and respond to customer input.
ResellerRatings: A website that provides reviews of online retailers and more.
