Shoppers have questions.

Ask & Answer™ turns questions into sales.

Consumer recommendations are the most credible form of advertising ¹, and consumer content as the #1 aid to a buying decision ². Consumers trust one another, not traditional brand-created marketing, and smart brands seek new ways to engage consumers online, then integrate and analyze the customer voice.

Ask & Answer is the first-ever archive of customer-to-customer conversations. It enlivens the customer voice on e-commerce websites by enabling consumers to ask and answer questions about products or categories within the purchase path. Retailers, manufacturers, and other shoppers can contribute answers, building a transparent community and driving customer dialogue.

Ask & Answer is positioned within the product or category pages, so answers are available where a shopper is seeking information. This not only engages the shopper, but also drives natural search results to this content, increasing overall visibility for the product and website.

Bazaarvoice is the first company to put such Q&A capability on product pages, within the purchase path, where it can directly impact sales conversion of products. While forums and FAQs reside in a walled garden in the support area, Ask & Answer helps retailers convert curious shoppers into buyers.

Ask & Answer benefits

With Ask & Answer, online companies increase their natural search results, learn more about how their customers buy, and have the chance to quickly respond to customer needs. A question only needs to be answered once and it becomes a permanent, searchable asset for future shoppers with the same questions.

Clients have also reduced support call volume and allow support staff to focus on new or more challenging questions. Customers can answer questions, or retailers can have staff or manufacturer experts provide answers.

Getting – and staying – involved in the customer’s shopping experience helps build a better business. Ask & Answer has helped Bazaarvoice clients become engaged with more site visitors and drive conversions. As retailers and manufacturers continue to build a permanent Q&A asset, the gap between shopping consideration and purchase certainty decreases, while brand loyalty and customer satisfaction increase.

Fully moderated to stay on-topic, protect the company’s brand

Complete, professional content moderation ensures that user-generated content appearing on a site helps other customers decide whether or not to purchase a product or share an experience they had with that product. Moderation rejects questions and answers that are vacuous, profane, off topic, or otherwise inappropriate.

Bazaarvoice uses a combination of automated and manual methods to ensure the highest quality content for our clients. Our three-step process has allowed us to achieve a near 100% accuracy rate, and our turnaround times are much faster than industry standards. Plus, our team scales to meet volume demands, so our clients don’t have to.

Ask & Answer vs. forums and FAQs

Forums and FAQs are usually found in the support area of a site, far from the purchase path. Ask & Answer enables actual sales conversion, unlike typical forums or FAQs.

Forums are notorious from going off-topic, becoming rife with “trolls” and are difficult for users to search. The clean organization of Ask & Answer makes it easy for all questions and answers to be easily found, as they are all specific to either products or categories. Moderation ensures everything is on topic, and a client may even move a question to another product or category page if a customer inadvertently asks a question in the wrong place.

This structure also enables retailers, manufacturers and other “experts” to answer questions more easily. While manufacturers and retailers don’t always get involved in responding to forums because of their disorganization and difficulty in following on an ongoing basis, the Bazaarvoice Workbench enables clients to quickly review unanswered and/or questions and send them to staffers or manufacturers for answers, which someone can answer directly online. The conversation remains focused.

Research backs the need for Ask & Answer

Ask & Answer creates a searchable set of product- and/or category-related questions and answers that are beneficial to future shoppers. This product builds on the finding that most people who contribute to a community do so to help others. A Keller Fay study in November, 2007, said that, of 1,300 online shoppers who wrote product reviews, fully 90 percent write reviews in order to help others make better buying decisions and more than 70 percent want to help companies improve the products they build and carry. While this study focused on customer reviews, we believe this is also a major indicator for products such as Ask & Answer as well. This could be a driving factor behind the explosive growth of Q&A sites. For example, according to Hitwise, (“U.S. Visits to Question and Answer Websites Increased 118 Percent Year-over-Year,” March 2008), there has been an 889% increase in U.S. visits to Q&A sites from 2006 to 2008; 52-97% of the visitors to these sites in the past year are “new.”

Our research shows that, on average, 4% of all products with reviews have question marks in the text of the reviews. While some of these could be rhetorical questions (“What could be better?”), many of them are actual questions from reviewers out to the community.

Further, our analysis shows product reviews that include “?” in the body of the review have, on average, 17% lower ratings than those without question marks. Also, product reviews with “?” have 18% lower Net Promoter scores than those without question marks. Net Promoter scores are a 10-point scale reference to the customer’s perception of the online store. In creating this analysis, we searched for “?” across 120 of Bazaarvoice’s largest clients (highest review volume) which do not have Ask & Answer deployed.

Clients find success with Ask & Answer

Ask & Answer enables brands have direct appears on e-commerce sites where consumers have questions before or after the sale. Examples include The Home Depot Canada (www.homedepot.ca), PETCO’s Answer Den (go here and click on “The Answer Den”). In both cases, Ask & Answer at the category level assists customers in specific topic areas.

Answer Den drives orders, stickiness for PETCO.com

We compared browsers who utilized the Answer Den, PETCO’s customized version of Bazaarvoice Ask & Answer, with browsers who visited any category page and did not interact with Answer Den. Those who interacted with Answer Den had:

• 72% higher conversion rate
• 100% more orders per session
• 90% more page views per session
• 9% higher average order value
• 28% more items/order
• -6% item abandonment rate
• -6% shopping cart abandonment rate

Ask & Answer reduces support costs

For Canadian Tire, we compared specific products before Ask & Answer was launched versus six months after it went live. We only considered product-related questions, not customer service-related questions, and we also accounted for efficiencies that Canadian Tire created themselves. The results shown are primarily due to Ask & Answer functionality.

• Products that have at least one answered question received 28% fewer support requests (calls or emails)
• 67% decrease for products with two answers
• 81% decrease for products with three or more answers

As of August 24, Ask & Answer has been deployed on 45 sites, including the examples cited above and Canadian Tire, Shoes.com, Best Buy, JC Whitney, Kmart, Sears, DSW, Figleaves, Away.com, Motosport, Cisco, Halfords and Loblaw (Presidentschoice.ca).
The product was recognized by Austin Business Journal as the leading “Tech Innovation” in the software category in 2007.

• Sources

• ¹Nielsen, “Word-of-Mouth the Most Powerful Selling Tool,” October 2007:
  According to a global Nielsen survey of 26,486 Internet users in 47 markets, consumer recommendations are the most credible form of advertising among 78% of the study’s respondents,
• ²Consumer survey by the JC Williams Group ranked consumer content as the #1 aid to a buying decision, cited by 91% of respondents. (JC Williams Group, August 2006)