Archive for the ‘Customer Centricity’ Category

Heather Brunner Nominations open for the third annual Social Commerce Awards

February 23rd, 2010 by Heather Brunner Chief Operations Officer

How has UGC improved your business? Is your brand a “social commerce rock star”? Nominations are now open for the 2010 Social Commerce Awards, and we want your brand’s story!

The Social Commerce Awards recognize the companies that are transforming their business with Bazaarvoice. Past winners include Helzberg Diamonds, Intuit/TurboTax, JC Whitney, and Sephora. This year’s categories are:

  • Rookie of the Year Award (2) – These two companies are new on the social scene and pioneering social strategy in their own ways.
  • Social Commerce Play of the Year Award – This company ran a really interesting and innovative social campaign that made customers and the industry stand up and take notice.
  • Social Commerce Rockstar Award – This company understood that success must be measured. Their campaign or strategy directly related to a bottom-line goal, and they nailed it.
  • Social Commerce MVP Award – This company used the power of their most influential customers to create a bigger conversation that attracted a whole new group of people to engage with their brand. Success is defined as how many new customers they attracted and how they kept the conversation alive and kicking.
  • Customer Oxygen Award – This company used the customer voice to make huge changes throughout the business. Leveraging user-generated content changed their day-to-day business habits, and produced measurable results across the organization.

Want more information? Think your company has the story to win an award? Talk to your Client Success Director to learn more and to nominate your brand! Nominations are open until March 25th, and winners will be announced April 21, 2010.

Meghan Meehan Social Commerce transforms Nationwide’s company culture

February 22nd, 2010 by Meghan Meehan Client Success Director

Nationwide InsuranceIn the last post from our recent webinar with Nationwide, we talked about how the insurance provider was able to overcome organizational concerns about adopting social media in a highly-regulated industry. Once they achieved internal buy-in, Sue McManus, Nationwide’s VP of Direct and Customer Solutions Marketing, and Shawn Morton, Director of Mobile, Social & Emerging Media, faced a new challenge: driving real business results through UGC.

Setting measurable business goals for UGC

Once Nationwide decided to move forward with a social strategy, their first step was to identify goals for their UGC. At a high level, Shawn and Sue wanted to build trust and confidence in the Nationwide brand among current and potential policy holders. Consumers want to hear from their peers before making a purchase decision. Recognizing this, Nationwide wanted to give customers the opportunity to share their experiences, helping prospects find the information they need at the point of purchase.

At a more specific level, Nationwide needed to show real, direct business benefits from UGC. To do this, the brand aligned its social commerce efforts with three key business goals: increasing policy conversion rate, driving SEO traffic, and improving marketing effectiveness.

Meeting these goals with social commerce

Nationwide has leveraged Ratings & Reviews in a number of ways to meet their corporate goals and grow their business.

Nationwide reviews

Enabling customer reviews on auto insurance. Customer reviews on insurance policies provide relevant content that consumers trust, helping them determine the right policy for their needs and take the next step towards a purchase decision.

Pushing content to customers’ social networks. Using Social Network Accelerators, Nationwide customers are invited to share reviews with their Facebook network, helping Nationwide reach new audiences and bringing traffic back to the brand site.

Nationwide reviews on FacebookDriving SEO with fresh content. Enabling UGC provides the site with rich, relevant content that is continually updated, driving organic search traffic to Nationwide.com.

Improving paid search ads. Keywords pulled from customer reviews make for compelling paid search ads, bringing new traffic to the brand site by reaching customers in their own words.

Measuring the results

Nationwide segments site visitors who interact with UGC from those who don’t, and compares their behavior against the goals above.  Specifically, they look at the quote start rate, quote completion rate, and policy bind rate for both audiences, and measure the difference in performance. They also track “intent to buy” metrics, like finding an Agent’s office or contacting Nationwide directly. Additionally, they look at click-through and conversion rates for homepage ads and paid search landing pages with UGC, benchmarking the performance of both segments over time.

Spreading these results to the entire organization

The impact of UGC doesn’t end on Nationwide’s website. Since launching Ratings & Reviews, they have embraced customer oxygen across the organization, transforming the brand’s culture and the way they talk to customers.  “As much as we can bring the voice of the customer to every employee in this company,” says Sue, “the more effective we’re going to be.”

Any Nationwide employee can read customer reviews online, giving everyone from claims representatives to executives tremendous insight into how the brand is doing and what their customers value. This translates into recommendations and improvements, helping pinpoint what the brand is doing well and where they can invest more to better serve customers.

There’s also a strong motivational effect, Sue says. Many reviews praise claims reps that went out of their way to help customers. We are in the business of putting people back to normal after something bad happens,” says Sue. “When you see that we’re doing that every day, over and over again, and you see the emotions that our customers share in a very positive light, it really helps drive and prioritize our behavior as an organization. It’s very inspirational content internally.”

Want to hear more about Nationwide’s use of social commerce?  The full webinar, “Overcoming Your Fear of User-Generated Content: A Webinar for Highly-Regulated Industries,” is available to download for free, here:

Download the webinar

Meghan Meehan Nationwide’s strategy for facing the fear of UGC & overcoming internal objections to Social Commerce

February 15th, 2010 by Meghan Meehan Client Success Director
Sue McManus, VP of Direct and Customer Solutions Marketing at Nationwide

Sue McManus, VP of Direct and Customer Solutions Marketing at Nationwide

As a Client Success Director for Bazaarvoice’s Financial Services team, I’ve worked with several financial services brands to build social commerce strategies that increase online conversion and search, as well as improve customer service and client retention. But sometimes it’s daunting to make headway with new media in such highly-regulated industries.

When we started collaborating with Nationwide Insurance, they faced questions from Legal, Compliance, PR and Customer Service about the risks of participating in social. Nationwide created a strategy for overcoming objections to UGC and now embrace “customer oxygen” across all aspects of the organization, and have seen measurable business results from doing so.

Shawn Morton, Director of Mobile, Social & Emerging Media at Nationwide

Shawn Morton, Director of Mobile, Social & Emerging Media at Nationwide

In our recent webinar with Nationwide, Sue McManus, VP of Direct and Customer Solutions Marketing, and Shawn Morton, Director of Mobile, Social & Emerging Media, shared how they were able to overcome organizational concerns about adopting Social Media.

Facing the fear of UGC

One of Nationwide’s brand tenets is “we listen,” and they saw social commerce as a new opportunity to listen to the needs of their customers. Before moving forward, Sue and Shawn faced the fear that many companies face in embracing UGC: the fear of the unknown. What would happen, and how would they deal with it? What teams needed to be involved? Who would run it, and who would make sure it complied with industry regulations? Even with evidence like the J-curve indicating reviews would likely be positive, Nationwide wanted to see the results for themselves.

Strategy for overcoming objections

The key to Sue and Shawn’s success in gaining company-wide buy-in was to garner executive support across the organization. Gaining this support required a four part strategy.

  1. Reinforce importance of participating in the conversation. Nationwide looked for best practices outside the insurance industry, taking inspiration from Dell’s IdeaStorm and Best Buy’s Blue Shirt Nation. They realized that participating – and being transparent in doing so – was important. Our executives realized the time had come to stop watching and start doing,” Sue said.
  2. Ensure brand protection through content moderation. Moderation was Nationwide’s golden ticket to social commerce. It allowed the brand to limit their risk while staying authentic.
  3. Demonstrate the business value of investing in Social. Sue and Shawn showed execs the business impact of the investment, examining how UGC would impact Nationwide’s advertising, reputation management, PR, and SEO to provide better, more relevant content on the brand site. Tying social to real business objectives created a compelling case for moving forward.
  4. Create a process for testing and measuring results. Nationwide tested the strategy first, sending review solicitation emails to a subset of customers to see what type of content they would get. As expected, customer feedback was extremely positive.

Using this strategy, Sue and Shawn were able to gain the executive level buy-in they needed to bring the customer voice to the center of the Nationwide brand.

Their biggest piece of advice to help position social commerce to senior management? Tie it to clear business objectives, says Shawn. It isn’t enough to say something is a “fun, new trend.” Make the business case the old-fashioned way, just as you would for any other investment. Demonstrate the value behind social in numbers; show how reviews impact decisions. From there it’s easy to gain the executive advocates you need to make a case for social across your organization.

Want more? The full webinar is available to download for free, here:

Download the free webinarThis is the first of two posts from our webcast for highly regulated industries. Stay tuned to our blog to see how Nationwide is using social commerce today, and how it’s transforming their corporate culture. You can also read more about Nationwide’s use of social on Shawn Morton’s blog, here.

Sam Decker Pizza Throwdown puts Domino’s Pizza Turnaround to the test

February 8th, 2010 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer

They called it the “Pizza Turnaround.”

The Bazaarvoice Pizza ThrowdownTaste tests and focus groups had execs at Domino’s Pizza cringing as unhappy pizzaphiles gave brutally honest feedback on the taste of their pizza. Domino’s executives had a choice to make: go about their business – as many brands would – or learn from this negative feedback and change their 50 year old recipe.

Domino’s chose wisely, embracing customer oxygen and revamping their recipe. We hear the “what about negative reviews?” question all the time. What Domino’s finally realized is an idea Bazaarvoice promotes to our clients each day – negative reviews are a gift, an opportunity to improve your products and services to further delight your customers. We’ve seen this philosophy work wonders for clients like Oriental Trading Company and Land of Nod.

Where many brands would privately have gone about their business by rationalizing or ignoring the feedback, Domino’s did the opposite. And the pizza chain took their efforts a step further, launching a national campaign promoting how bad their pizza used to be. Their message was simple: “We were failing you. We finally heard you. Here’s what we did about it. Won’t you try us again?”

As passionate advocates of customer oxygen, we naturally applauded these campaigns. But we were curious, as the ads no doubt intended – is the new Domino’s recipe really better? We decided to conduct our own scientific test (NOT… but we think close enough) to see how listening to and acting on the opinions of their customers had benefited the chain.

The Bazaarvoice Pizza Throwdown

Tasters' stated preferences before the taste test

Tasters' stated preferences before the taste test

We found ten self-proclaimed pizza connoisseurs to participate in a taste test of Domino’s against its top two national competitors – Pizza Hut and Papa John’s. We ordered large cheese pizzas with original crust from each, testing the competitors on the pizza basics.

Before the test, we asked the tasters to tell us which pizza they thought they liked best. Papa John’s was the clear favorite, with 60% of the vote.

Each taster was blindfolded to ensure responses were based solely on taste. They were then asked to taste a slice of each competitor’s pizza, and give their reviews, rating each pizza on sauce, crust, cheese, and overall taste.

The Results

Tasters' choices for best overall taste

Tasters' blind choices for best overall taste

We weren’t sure what to expect. Even if Domino’s didn’t win, we thought they still had a great story to tell, as they’d demonstrated action and accountability to customer feedback. But fortunately for this story and for Domino’s, the new and improved pizza was the clear winner, with 50% of the tasters picking the chain’s new recipe as the tastiest pie.

Domino’s outperformed the competitors in every aspect of the test, earning 3.8 out of a possible 5 stars for overall taste.

Pizza components' taster ratings

Pizza components' taster ratings

You can watch how the taste test was done in our video here and on Youtube:

YouTube Preview Image

By embracing their customers’ negative feedback, Domino’s was able to improve their product quality and impress their customers. And not only are customers happy with the change, but so are shareholders! Apparently the campaign is expected to be a sales hit – Domino’s stock is up close to 50% over prices three months ago.

Domino's three month stock prices

Domino's three month stock prices

Operationalizing customer feedback to radically improve an entire organization is something we help our clients do every day. Does your business have the tools to embrace the voice of the customer?

Rachel Hocevar Blue Shield of California first in the healthcare industry to introduce online customer reviews

January 13th, 2010 by Rachel Hocevar Client Success Director

Blue Shield of CaliforniaIt’s exciting to see new types of industries win with user-generated content, and Blue Shield of California has been a first-mover in the healthcare field – they added Ratings & Reviews to their site in September 2009. Blue Shield officially announced their launch of R&R today. You can read about it in AdAge or on our site.

I sat down with Jason Yang, their Brand Manager – Corporate Brand Marketing, who shared his insights about user-generated content.

Why did Blue Shield of California choose to add customer reviews to the site?

Jason YangWe are committed to making health care easier for our members and felt that Ratings & Reviews is a good way to obtain open, honest feedback from our members. We saw this as an opportunity for us to learn from our members and share information in a transparent way – it’s the right thing to do. We recognize that members want to be heard, and we want to give them the opportunity to have their voice be out there. We know consumers value information from other consumers like them, so the easier we can make it for members to share their perspective, the better off the industry, our members, and our ability to provide access to quality health care at an affordable price.

Being the first in the health plan to add UGC to your site, what challenges did Blue Shield of California face?

This has not been done with health plans before, so there really wasn’t a roadmap for us to follow. In a lot of ways, we were starting from scratch. It took a lot of work and creativity to get it going and to push through the idea that this is something right for health plans. We’ve seen really great participation numbers; we received hundreds of reviews in the first month, which exceeded our expectations.

We also have to protect the privacy of our members, providers, and doctors. The healthcare industry is very cognizant of privacy. We took a lot of steps to moderate the content to protect personal health information and individual privacy along with the usual guidelines for inappropriate language, so we could actually get feedback that could be displayed to the public in a way that was appropriate and still open, transparent, and safe.

How did you overcome these challenges?

Relative to other industries, our approach to moderating content is probably very conservative. Protecting members and personal health information is incredibly important to us, and we took all of the critical steps necessary to make sure that the information and system is secure. We updated our online policy guidelines so they covered new content offerings like member driven reviews.

We read every review to make sure the guidelines were appropriate and not too restrictive, but at the same time we wanted to make sure we presented an unbiased perspective. We spent a lot of time going through member feedback word by word to be sure we weren’t putting anyone at risk.

How is Blue Shield of California measuring their success in social commerce?

We are tracking things like member engagement and participation in the reviews program. We track actions taken by our customer service folks to help members that have written a review, we look at our search results, and our issue resolution results. We have been pleased with results we’ve seen, not just from a score perspective, but also with the ability of our customer service folks to follow up with members who have expressed a problem or a need, and to actually help them. There is rich data in that member feedback, and we’ve identified a couple of things that we want to focus on, and opportunities to improve upon products and services.

How has user generated content impacted the way you work with customers?

User-generated content helps us understand our customer needs and concerns with real-time feedback, and gives us a great opportunity to create a dialog with them. We’ve already learned a great deal from the member feedback we’ve received. Internally, there is a lot of excitement from all areas of the company about the feedback we’re getting through Ratings & Reviews, and we can continue to improve our processes, our offerings, and our services based on this input.

From the customer service perspective, we are reaching out to customers online more than ever to help them, because we know it’s a channel that they’re using now.

What are the social commerce goals for Blue Shield of California in 2010?

More than ever, our members go online to get information. The online channel is a new medium where they have chosen to share their experiences. Ratings & Reviews is one of several new programs that we’ll be launching to engage our members in new and exciting ways. We want to expand customer reviews to reach all of our millions of members. This ongoing dialog will help us continue to provide the right services and keep our members satisfied.

What are some of the most significant insights you have gained?

Our members really have a lot of feedback to share, and it’s been incredibly valuable for us to get that first-hand, real-time perspective. It’s helping us move faster in taking action to make things easier for our members. Our employer customers are also really excited about the ability to get feedback from their employees about the health plans they have with us.

Adding customer reviews to our site was a cross-functional effort which included marketing, customer service, our e-business and information technology team, our privacy team, our legal team, and public relations folks.

Amber Quist Participate – interact – sell: Building relationships online

January 11th, 2010 by Amber Quist Senior Marketing Manager

Every interaction with a consumer – no matter how small – drives conversations, which drive business results. Our recent white paper, “Get Them Talking: How Growing Participation Chains Will Grow Sales” shows how even small interactions can increase sales and loyalty – and every word counts. Read more about participation chains in this blog post.

Now we’re following up with a webinar featuring new media visionary Ze Frank and Bazaarvoice CMO Sam Decker: “Participate, Interact, Sell: Building Relationships Online.”

Tune in to learn:

  • How to create a participation chain strategy that captures every interaction possible
  • How top brands build successful participation chains
  • Top reasons people are motivated to participate or contribute content

Join Ze and Sam for this webinar on Tuesday, January 19, 2010, at 1 pm CST by registering here:

Register for the Webinar here!Download the free white paper, “Get Them Talking: How Growing Participation Chains Will Grow Sales,” here.

Download the white paper here!We look forward to talking more about how to get consumers participating – and buying.

Sam Decker Douglas Rushkoff: How New Media (Unlike Marketing) Forces You to be Competent Again

December 21st, 2009 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer

Douglas Rushkoff is an author, teacher, and documentarian who focuses on the ways people, cultures, and institutions create, share, and influence each other’s values. He lectures around the world, and will keynote the 2010 Social Commerce Summit. He has a unique view of brands and how new media changes the game (or takes it back to its core) for brands.

At the Social Commerce Summit, you’ll be speaking to hundreds of manufacturers, retailers, and service providers who want to open themselves up to learning from their own customers. How does “thinking inside the box” relate to them? How have brands responded thus far to your message?rushkoffbiopicmed

Well, brands can’t actually respond to anything. Maybe that’s the whole point. Brands aren’t alive. They’re myths. The brand was invented in the earliest days of corporatism, as a way to recreate the experience of a human relationship with the person you used to buy from. You bought shoes from a cobbler, beer from the beermeister, and so on. You had relationships with those people.

The industrial age meant separating producers from consumers, so brands needed to be invented to bridge that gap. The Quaker on the box of oatmeal helped people feel as good about a long-distance, packaged product as they did about the one made by their friend. And mass media arose to broadcast those myths and images across the country, so that people would have relationships to brands before they ever even saw the products. (more…)

Brant Barton UK Takes Lead in Online Advertising

October 12th, 2009 by Brant Barton Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer

eMarketer reported last week that in the first half of 2009, the UK became the first major economy to see online advertising spending surpass TV ad spending. According to the report, the Internet accounted for 23.5% of UK advertising revenue vs. 21.9% for television. This is big news and not without controversy, as the UK TV lobby is protesting the aggregate number reported for Internet ad revenue, which includes paid search (the largest category by nearly 3X), online classifieds, display media, and other formats.

While the experts argue over the math, I think that UK (and US) advertisers and consumers should celebrate this milestone. While the US Internet-TV ad spending gap is still sizable, the steady migration of dollars over the coming years will drive Internet industry growth and evolution, yes, but also a more customer-centric experience for consumers faced with hard decisions in an increasingly complex economic and marketing environment. Advertiser spending on social marketing/commerce applications is still significantly smaller than the leading categories of Internet ad spending mentioned above. However, as we have witnessed firsthand over the last 4+ years of building Bazaarvoice (and shared on many occasions on Bazaarblog), the social category offers perhaps the greatest opportunity for advertisers to think bigger than clickthroughs and conversion rates and instead focus on wholesale cultural and operational transformation of their businesses using the voice of the customer as a muse.

This news from the UK is timely, as we just wrapped up our second annual Social Commerce Summit in London, the European complement to our US Social Commerce Summit held in Austin every year. We now serve over 120+ customers across Europe, and the London Summit was a sold out event. In the coming days, we will share highlights from the Summit here on Bazaarblog!

Sam Decker Webinar Wrap-up: How to Deal with Negative Word of Mouth

September 22nd, 2009 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer

Andy Sernovitz, author of Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking, and I hosted a well-attended webinar last week about the all-important topic of negative reviews.

Andy Sernovitz Webinar with Bazaarvoice CMO Sam DeckerAlmost four years ago, when I started at Bazaarvoice, negative reviews were the #1 concern of prospects; we battled this by proving that most reviews are positive with research done by Keller Fay in 2006, showing that 80% of all reviews are positive. With the proliferation of social networks, today brands know that negative feedback is inevitable, and they’re learning to use negative feedback to improve offerings and build trust with consumers.

As always, Andy gave some great insights in the webinar, which boil down to these steps:

Monitor. Google your brand, stay alert on Twitter – always look for ways people are talking about your brand. Do this daily; you don’t want to be caught unaware four days after a negative reaction has spread over the internet.

Respond to negative WOM. Responding starts way before a negative interaction!

1: Preempt The Negative. Create a long-term outreach program, know relevant bloggers in your space, and build authentic rapport. Let your critics and fans interact by bringing your critics “inside the tent,” on your site or in relevant, public interactions with your brand.

2. Let your fans respond first. This is the home-run scenario. Don’t wait too long, though, to say “Thank you” for the feedback and “I’m sorry.” Don’t respond at all when a complaint is so small that you don’t want to give it credibility, when you’re obviously being set up or if it’s a known crackpot that’s pursuing you. Most of the time, however, you should respond. When you do, do it the same day, respond as a human, not a corporation, make sure to put your side on the record, and don’t try to “win” – you just want to look responsive.

3. Know the ethics rules. The best way to respond is to authentically say, “I work for ______, and this is my personal opinion.” This instantly builds credibility, as many people will assume you’re being paid by the company to tow the company line. If you have a PR person or outsider speak on your behalf, give full disclosure; never pay someone to bolster your side of the story. Be transparent.

4. Training. The biggest risk in today’s user-generated, Internet-enabled society is to not be prepared, companywide, for negative feedback. As a company, you want to create a formal policy and training program, and hold your agencies to the same standards as your employees – in writing. The Social Media Business Council has excellent resources for helping large organizations build social media strategies.

At Bazaarvoice, we’ve seen several companies turn negative reviews into big wins – companies have improved products and offerings, built trust in their brands, and decreased returns by setting better expectations. The Land of Nod remanufactured a craft table and Oriental Trading Company improved more than 700 products and/or marketing materials due to negative feedback from consumers.

Our content moderation process also helps clients easily see ratings trends and potential liabilities through moderation reports, so brands can see problems long before they become huge and impact the entire community. We’ve also created ways for brands to communicate directly with consumers and the community to publicize what they’re doing to solve the problem.

Samsung is a good example of this. On one of their refrigerators, the ice machine begins working six hours after it’s plugged in, but some consumers didn’t know this, so they assumed the fridge was broken. Return rates were very high, and Samsung used reviews to uncover the issue. The product manager improved communication around the issue, even creating a video explaining this, which plays in stores. Shortly after this improvement, return rates plummeted, and more people were happy with their purchases.

QVC, along with dozens of other brands, have regular executive-level meetings around negative reviews, using this first-hand customer input to drive continuous improvement.

Today’s consumers have the chance to have a real impact on products, services, and consumer awareness. More and more smart brands are using Bazaarvoice tools to let those consumer voices fuel real operational change.

Want to watch this webinar? Request it here.

Sam Decker Oriental Trading Company wins prestigious Gartner Customer Experience Award

September 16th, 2009 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer

Oriental Trading Company has used customer reviews to transform their business, from the outside in.

OTC

Founded in 1932 and now offering more than 35,000 products, Oriental Trading Company is the nation’s leading direct marketer of value-priced party supplies, arts and crafts, toys and novelties. And while their business started with catalogs, in 2008 they embraced the Internet and have been recognized as one of the Top 50 Internet Retailers.

They won the “Organizational Transformation” award because they used customer ratings and reviews to uncover problems with products, then worked cross-functionally to make improvements. Teams meet weekly to discuss low-rated products,  and create plans that continually optimize their process . The teams include representatives from all over the company, including Inventory, Product Development, Quality Assurance, Merchandising, E-Commerce and Customer Service.

With potential problems coming to light much faster, the company is able to work alongside manufacturers to improve their offerings based on the feedback, using reviews to set standards and provide feedback directly to vendors. As a result of customer reviews, the company has changed the entire product production process, including inspecting products against the production samples more closely. Also, initial product design takes place with customer feedback at the forefront, decreasing the chance for negative feedback and potential returns.

Oriental Trading Company received their 2009 Customer Experience Excellence Award yesterday at the Gartner Customer Relationship Management Summit, where Sam Taylor spoke on their amazing results. They are also featured in the Fall 2009 issue of 1to1 Magazine, in a special issue of 1to1 Weekly and on both the Gartner Events and 1to1 Media web sites.

Congratulations to the Oriental Trading Company team on this prestigious award!