In the travel industry, we’ve witnessed a higher average number of reviews a day – understandable, since so many travelers book online, and want to share their travel experience with others. Edreams sees an average of 323 reviews a day, compared to the typical 65 reviews a day for retailers. The higher price point of travel creates more critical decision-makers and contributors, leading to more critical feedback. The travel industry stands to gain from these reviews in the same way restaurants benefit from negative customer feedback, as Derrek J. Hull, voice of the National Restaurant Association, writes in his blog post. Hull emphasizes that every business can expect a negative review at some point; smart business owners will take that review as an opportunity to start a conversation with the customer. The ball is now in their court.

Like travel, the entertainment industry has a higher price point than most online products. But there’s also larger price range – tickets to Taylor Swift’s upcoming Austin concert range from $91 to $682 on Razorgator. This leads to highly inquisitive and engaged shoppers viewing user-generated content. I know from personal experience; I check out what people say about the act, whether it’s worth the price, and any recommendations on seats. Who wouldn’t want to research a bit, especially with the choice between paying a few bucks, a few hundred, or not even going at all?

Another interesting and fairly new industry in the UGC game is the financial services industry. Our financial services clients like Geico are quickly gathering review volume from customers wanting to share their opinions, and are actually seeing many more of their reviews being served up on their websites than on typical retail sites. In other words, visitors to financial services sites click to “Read Reviews” more often, curious to see what customers are saying. This is expected, as much more research goes into choosing a financial services provider than the typical product; UGC helps meet the higher shopper demand for information.

Charlene Li (author of Groundswell) and Jeremiah Owyang, both leading experts in emerging social technologies, explained in their socialgraphics webinar that most consumers just “watch” social media – meaning, they read reviews, consume Q&A, etc., and fewer actually contribute. If travel, entertainment and financial services trend the same way that retail has, there will be a gradual but definite build in customers contributing content as user-generated content becomes more prevalent in all of these industries.

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.

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.

Driving 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:

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

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:

This 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.

This webcast gets to the heart of these concerns, explaining how Nationwide Insurance tackled these issues – and won big with consumers.

Join us and see how Nationwide partnered with Bazaarvoice and Rosetta to:

• Overcome organizational concerns about posting user-generated content on their website
• Assess the issues and find the right solutions
• Measure the results of user-generated content across the entire business

Thursday, February 11, 2010
11:30 to 12:30 EST

Speakers

Sue McManus
Leader of Nationwide Direct and Customer Solutions
Nationwide Insurance

Shawn Morton
Director of Social Media
Nationwide Insurance

Adam Cohen
Partner, Social Media Lead
Rosetta

Marc Ostryniec
Vice President of Financial Services Division
Bazaarvoice

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?

We 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.