Article

Ecommerce and the Voice of the Consumer—Feedback matters

Customers expect an excellent experience both in-store and online. Even if your enterprise doesn’t have a physical store, the consumer experience is still a defining factor. The voice of the consumer is what your shoppers say about their experience with your brand. Use consumer feedback to put your shop in front of the competition. 

Read on to see how you can harness the power of feedback to elevate your ecommerce shop.

Why is the Voice of the Consumer important for ecommerce? 

Voice of the customer, also called voice of the consumer, is now the leading way to understand your customer. Be proactive about asking for feedback. Let consumers tell you what they want and need to remove the guesswork from discovering their desires. To review, see The Voice of the Customer Guide: Importance, VoC tools and examples.

89% of consumers worldwide make the effort to read reviews before buying a product (1).

This stat alone reveals how influential the voice of the consumer is to other potential consumers. What others have to say about your products often provides more value and trust to your brand than what you have to say about your own shop. 

Investigate what is being said about your company. If it’s good, use it to promote. If not, use the feedback to improve. Let’s dive into how you can collect this feedback. 

Methods of gathering customer feedback

The opportunities for feedback collection are plentiful. Consider these ways to capture your voice of the consumer data.

Questionnaires

Send out a questionnaire to ask for feedback regarding different stages of the customer journey. 

  • Did they find your website intuitive? 
  • Was checkout easy? 
  • Were they satisfied with the product/service? 
  • Would they recommend you to a friend? (Yes, this is a Net Promoter Score question.)  

You can also send out questionnaires to loyal customers to test out new concepts. For more examples, see 5 ways to use the new questionnaire that you haven’t thought of yet!.

Interviews

Just because your shop operates online does not discount the importance of interviews. Interviews offer a great way to obtain the raw, unfiltered voice of the consumer data and it will build trust with those whom you interview. 

Conduct the interview over the phone or even by email at the convenience of your client. Make sure to ask them if you can record the interview and even use them on your website for customer quotes. 

Online Reviews

Our suggestion: Don’t wait and simply hope customers leave reviews. Why?

Your customers are much more willing to give reviews than you think:

76% of consumers will leave a review if asked (2). 

Woman asked to leave an online review and she's thinking, "Sure why not?"
Get voice of the consumer feedback by simply asking for it

So don’t be shy. Why not automate a review invitation after every purchase? There are many providers offering this solution. 

These online reviews will provide valuable insight on what you consumers think about your brand, their customer journey and your products/services. See this article: 5 reasons to use a tool to manage reviews for your online store

Live Chat

If you have the capabilities, use live chat to talk to customers when they’re on your site. They’ll love the convenience of a quick answer and will find their purchasing made easier as they could quickly get an answer to their question. 

Additionally, to reduce cart abandonment, consider putting a live chat on your checkout page or pricing page.

We believe the above tools are the best to help ecommerce sites gather the voice of the consumer feedback. Check out Voice of the Customer Tools to Improve Customer Experience for a few more techniques to look into. 

How to use feedback to promote your shop

Show you care by taking reviews seriously. Many customers find that brands don’t respond to their reviews at all and guess what? When you don’t respond to reviews, you risk increasing your customer churn by 15%. (3)

Turn negative feedback in your favour 

Respond well to negative feedback. And yes, consumers look for how a company responds to negative feedback. If you end up collecting a lot of reviews (as you should!), you’re bound to have a few negative ones. But you know what? That works to build trust. 30% of consumers will not believe your reviews to be real if you don’t have any negative ones (4)

Additionally, by responding quickly and appropriately, you might be able to convince a consumer to edit their rating or review of your shop and end up with another positive review. 

Negative customer feedback is also always an opportunity to learn from the voice of the consumer. Perhaps they’ll enjoy your product overall, but mention a small pain point in a review or questionnaire. Fix it to increase sales and customer satisfaction. 

Optimise, optimise, optimise

Oh, and another thing we’ve heard to be helpful: Optimise product descriptions based on feedback. Then your consumers’ expectations are more likely to match your product or service. And then they’ll be happy, and likely loyal! 

Improve your shop based on customers’ likes and dislikes. This goes beyond your company’s offerings, but also includes the customer experience: 

  • Were they able to find all the information they needed?
  • If not, was help readily available? 
  • How did they experience the checkout process? 
  • Did the product description accurately reflect the product? 

Evolve whether it’s positive, neutral, or negative. Analyse the results and make actionable decisions.  

Use feedback to encourage purchases

As the ecommerce industry is online, it relies heavily on consumer reviews and ecommerce shops need quite a bit of reviews per product to drive revenue. Look: 

Reviews of 50 or more per product can mean a 4.6% increase in conversion rates (4).

Increase your ecommerce shop’s conversion rate by using voice of the consumer data directly on your website. Many companies encourage purchasing by displaying consumer reviews. 

For example, here at Customer Alliance, we offer a widget that clients can integrate on their website to display the customer feedback they receive.  

Customer Alliance Widget with customer feedback
Customer Alliance widget displaying customer feedback on website

Lastly, it’s important to distribute consumer feedback among various review portals to build your online presence. Make sure you have reviews on all relevant review platforms. By doing so, you’ll attract new consumers to your website. 

In conclusion, investing in a voice of the consumer solution is an excellent step to building your ecommerce site’s online visibility and promoting customer trust.

Sources:

  1. Trustpilot Report: The critical role of reviews in Internet trust
  2. Learning Hub: 51 Customer Review Statistics to Make you Rethink Using Them
  3. Chatmeter: Google Confirms Responding To Reviews Improves Your Local SEO
  4. Vendasta Infographic: 50 Important Stats You Need to Know About Online Reviews

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The Voice of the Customer survey for competitive customer insights

Hotel VoC: The key to guest satisfaction is voice of the customer

VoC Restaurant 101: Develop a Voice of the Customer Strategy