0:00 Hi, everyone. I'm so excited to be here with you today. My name is Ashley Knowles. I'm a client success director at Bazaar Voice and a team lead, and it currently support some of our largest strategic retailers. 0:15 Prior, I worked with some of our largest brand to operate at a global level. So it's been really insightful for me to work on both sides of the aisle. 0:25 And I'm happy to talk to you about a topic near and dear to my heart today, which is responding to negative reviews and online feedback. 0:36 Before I dive any further, just in case any of you are not familiar with the role of a client success director, I often describe it as I am the lead consultant to my clients to make sure that they're gonna get the most value out of their investment with bizarre voice. 0:53 So critical piece of my role is conducting discovery, with our business stakeholders to understand your goals and your aspirations and how we can map our product back, have an active success plan, and then my job is also to help on reporting out progress and ROI. So really excited to talk to you today. 1:17 So for those of you who aren't familiar with bizarre voice, we are the largest global network of brands and retailer sites. So as you can see here, over eighty three hundred today and growing I'm also really excited to tell you that as part of our platform, we have the influencer community. 1:36 This is a digital destination where over eight million members go to research and review products. 1:45 So we often talk about this like the TripAdvisor for products I really encourage you if you haven't gone to influencer dot com or you haven't downloaded the app to check it out firsthand to really get a sense for this experience, but we're actually seeing, over one million reviews submitted by this community per month. 2:05 And to date that's a little over fifty million reviews. And we think this is really important because brands and retailers can engage this community to connect with new shoppers to drive discovery around their products to win market share through some really unique sampling opportunities. 2:23 And then this summer, we actually acquired a company called Curley, who's a market leading visual content platform and they specialize in social commerce strategies. 2:36 Among the many capabilities, we can now help you with social channels, making them shoppable, can help you collect and display social imagery that you can use on-site or on the retail channel. 2:50 So really now that bizarre voices offering includes securely visual platform and the influencer community We're the only team that can guide your user generated content. 3:01 We call this UDC from end to end. So really at the start, how do you inspire shoppers and help them discover you? 3:10 How do you help them in evaluation process to electing the product they're ultimately gonna choose or the service they're ultimately gonna choose. And then how do you learn from the insights the choppers are sharing back after that post purchase experience. 3:28 So we can help you now generate all kinds of user generated content from reviews and Q and A, but also to visual imagery and videos We can help you take that content and grow your business by displaying it in the right places and really creating that confidence that consumers need to create that loyalty loop. 3:57 While we'll be touching on various forms of feedback today, we will specialize a little around product reviews specifically. And as you heard me say, with the influencer community, and we're seeing one million reviews a month generated. 4:12 And this is really to me encouraging it. It shows that we're not losing any momentum. We're gaining it every year that this is a feedback loop that shoppers are really comfortable with, and we do annual research every year, the shopper experience index We surveyed five thousand shoppers in North America and Europe and Australia and some of the data you're seeing here is from the annual research. 4:41 So sixty one percent of shoppers always or sometimes leave reviews for the products they purchased. Seventy eight percent of shoppers trust product reviews and thirty nine percent of shoppers say product reviews are the online shopping feature they rely on the most. 4:59 And for me, I think this is something to pay attention to because businesses invest a lot in launching products and supporting products, and you wanna make sure at the end of the day, you're giving them that social validation, beyond what the information you have on the PDP that they're gonna feel confident in their assessment to buy your product with the reviews. 5:28 Another aspect of our shopper experience index research was the us consumers outright, do they expect a response? 5:38 To reviews. And I I wasn't surprised by the first that when a customer leaves a negative review, eighty seven percent of the time, they expect you to respond. 5:48 And I think that's, you know, human psychology. We've had a negative experience. We wanna feel validated. We wanna feel heard. What did take me a little bit by surprise is we are now seeing the expectation as well when a positive review is left. 6:02 And I think you know, it kind of falls in line with consumers really want that conversation. They wanna feel connection, to the brand and to the retailer. 6:14 So throughout my time as a client success structure, it's very common for clients to feel uneasy about negative reviews. 6:22 It's just something negative about your product out in the world, but really we know that it's more about the authenticity and the right mix of reviews because at the end of the day, a product cannot be all things to all people. That's just not realistic. Everyone has different needs and taste. And so if I go to a PDP and I see only five stars, it it almost calls into question, like, is this thing too good to be true? 6:54 So as part of this research that we did, into into online reviews and credibility, ninety three percent of shoppers say they would rather purchase a product with a lot of reviews and negative reviews compared to a product with no reviews and almost twice as many consumers say negative reviews are as important as positive views and making a decision process. 7:22 And just to give you an anecdote if I'm looking at a product and I wanna go and read some of the negative reviews to sort of suss out if that thing is meaningful to me. I won't say it was for a pair of jeans, and the author said, these are baggy. 7:42 Well, maybe I prefer my jeans to be baggy. So that negative review is still really helpful for me because the jeans are actually gonna meet the need that I want. 8:00 But ultimately, we think this is a huge opportunity, and it's also important to remember that the negative review is not the end of your relationship with the the person leaving the content. 8:12 So just a few more thoughts here. Seventy percent of dissatisfied customers say they will do business with the company again if their complaint is resolved. 8:23 So this is an opportunity for you to address their concern and really win back that trust. And a lot of times, I think, like, the biggest fans of the business they wanna leave that constructive criticism because ultimately, like, they want you to have a great product, and they wanna be able to tell their friends about it as well. 8:43 And additionally, two times as many customers, who purchase a product with a negative review, excuse me, customers are twice as likely to purchase a product with a negative review if the brand responds to the original comment. 8:56 I also think the point to take away here is that Yes. It's a one to one exchange as you're responding to that negative review, but what other customers go and they're reading those negative reviews and they see your response, you're really influencing all of the other shoppers, not just the original shopper. 9:22 So let's talk about how this comes into practice with a great example from Vervodet there, a brand tailor in Europe, and they specialize in children's clothes and nurse items and maternity wear. And what they noticed is they had, a line of maternity where And the customer was actually saying that the dress was high quality, but the way that the zipper fit essentially was misplaced. 9:52 And it was forcing them to buy a size, you know, two times larger than they would have. And so they were able to use the bizarre voice solution, and our insights to read from those reviews that really this was a QA issue where they needed to fix the sizing, and this really allowed them to show the customer that they were listening. 10:16 They had a whole measurement campaign, and they went basically went back and corrected that experience. And I think this just goes to show again. Like, so much goes into launching products and supporting them, but there are gonna be areas where something just did not get caught in that go to market process, and the reviews are a great way truly understand long term how is the product performing, especially if you're not manufacturing the product yourself. 10:47 This is a great way to understand the end consumer experience. And just another agreed story, and I should mention the Verbo Day and this Land of Lake story, they're both success stories that are available on our website. If you go look under our success story section, but Land of Lakes has and thus did quite heavily, in the reviews program because they gained so many wonderful insights from the things that they're their advocates are saying. 11:15 So they actually had a scenario where, there was a recipe for cinnamon rolls, and it just was not it was not written in a way where the recipe turned out. 11:26 Nobody wants a flat cinnamon roll, and so they were able to pick that up again in the insights from the reviews they're able to fix the recipe. 11:35 So those cinnamon buns turned out perfectly, and I think it's just a great example where you can really reward your customer for giving you that feedback and then you can make everyone happier moving forward. 11:51 So now that we've done a little bit of background as to why this is so important, we wanna get into the heart of our discussion today, which is eight ways to respond to negative online feedback, and then we'll have a Q and A session we'll be happy to answer anything, that comes up along the way. So let's dive in to our first one, which is responding immediately and politely. 12:17 So speed is important, in this world of feedback, and ultimately consumers are expecting a response to their review, and this also goes for questions within twenty four to forty eight hours. 12:33 So I love this example that you can see here. It's actually for a gray coat paint sprayer where the customer left a one star review did not have a good experience. 12:45 Graco comes in twenty four hours later. Really empathetic response. We're gonna talk about that, but really that to be able to respond quickly, the consumer knows you're paying attention. 12:59 And this is an example on, a brand or a retailer site. We know the stakes are different on social. 13:09 Shoppers, expect or reply to their tweet, to their comment, to their direct messages on social, typically within twenty four hours, you can see here some are really even expecting, an answer within one to two hours. 13:24 So really wanna make sure you're thinking about this in your various channels, how you're staffed up. And I wanna preempt a question that I typically receive around stopping. 13:38 So our rule of thumb when it comes two reviews is that you would need to allocate one hour for every fifty reviews. 13:47 That you'd want to respond to. And so to put that into, like, the perspective of a forty hour work week, you would, you know, you need two thousand reviews a week. 13:57 For forty hours. And then for questions, typically, we see you need at least three to five minutes If you have, you know, the right expertise there to answer, rate question that comes in. 14:15 Social media, as you mentioned, the stakes are slightly different. Things move at a more rapid pace than they would on a brand or a retailer site. And so just some some key stats to keep in mind here. Over a third of shoppers have asked a brand a question on social media in the past year. 14:35 Forty two percent of shoppers have made a purchase on a social media platform in the last year. And I think we're seeing, you know, with Facebook and Instagram and TikTok, we're seeing a lot of investment in social commerce, to really correlate back to how consumers wanna shop And lastly, about a third of shoppers have actually complained on social media in the past year. So just, you know, think about how your team will step up and how you'll answer these. It's it's sometimes one team who really covers all channels, and we've also seen companies who elect to have specialists for different channels. 15:22 Okay. Number two. Let's talk about showing some kindness and some empathy to your shoppers. If they're taking the time to leave some critical feedback for your business. 15:34 Really, we want to make sure we're acknowledging the customer's feelings We talked about this earlier. Consumers, like human psychology. I had a bad experience. I wanna tell you about it. 15:47 And I wanna make sure that improvements come because of it. So really, couple of ways you can show that empathy is do not be defensive. 15:58 You want to use phrases that articulate empathy, not just empathy, and you also want to check your biases. 16:07 The example that you're seeing here, this was a review left on a retailer's website you can see they really gave some context around the difficulty that they experienced, and I think their response was really solid. 16:25 I'm gonna read part of it here. We really appreciate your feedback. I think that in and of itself is really strong because you're acknowledging that they took time to share this. 16:38 And then I'm sorry to hear you're not getting the full quality experience. Of your cellmates, and then they also take the opportunity here to talk about their warranty, and how this customer can connect with them, and they can take advantage of that year long warranty. So I think this is, a really great example where They're showing that empathy. That must be really frustrating. 17:03 Also, the opportunity to get them to take advantage of that warranty. Number three, we need to accept fault where it is merited. 17:17 So of course, you know, there are going to be scenarios where the customer really just didn't use the product appropriately, maybe they misapplied it, but they didn't read instructions, and you're not gonna be responsible in that case to say I'm sorry. But if there are situations where there if you can accept acknowledgement, or fault, if you will, you should do that because it goes a long way with the customer. 17:49 So some examples here, like, it's understandably frustrating, our citing chart wasn't accurate. And I think on this example, something I want to share is I actually have a retail client who they use the insights from the reviews to catch those discrepancies in sizing or color on their site, and their QA team publicly responds to every shopper who left that review and thanks them for highlighting that. 18:20 I believe they actually, you know, go a little over and beyond for those customers because they had a bad experience, but I think it really resonates well with me that I see when I go to that site, like, wow. Like, they really listened. 18:32 They were appreciative, and they took responsibility that it wasn't accurate in the first place. So you can just see a couple of other examples here. 18:43 We should update our shipping times to prevent confusion. Whatever you can do to really say you helped us out we're taking responsibility and we're going to improve it because of you. 18:56 Okay. Where let's talk about being genuine now. Consumers are smart. They know when you're basically plug and playing. 19:07 You're gonna use the same kind of response over and over again. Really what I tell all of my clients is that you need to take the time to have somewhat of a personalized response or this could actually backfire. 19:21 Because if I go on a site and I see that there really is not thought being put into how the response is shared, that reflects negatively on the brand. 19:30 It would almost be better not to respond than to just have a generic repeated phrase. So some of the ways that you can show how you care, is we really recommend using your customer's name, whatever username or nickname, that they've submitted on the site, whatever you have to go off of there, rephrase the complaint and your response, especially so people can kind of really understand the issue from a from a different lens if it was written a little bit of a confusing way originally. 20:04 And then respond again in a more customized way. So just a a little example here, you know, Jillian left this response. 20:15 Jillian, we're so sorry to hear about the charging issue. If you're still experiencing this, we wanna talk to you further. So this is one great example. 20:27 Many more if you need them. Okay. Moving along. We're about halfway through. We want to, especially for the sake of time, and also brevity overall. Like, keep it simple. 20:41 Do not write responses that are too long. Personally, I remember leaving a review on Airbnb once and the response from the host was just this novel and quite frankly people's attention spans are not that long, and it almost just came off like they were defensive because it was so long. 21:01 So I think that's another reason why you want to be short into the point, acknowledge the issue, but make sure you know, you take some of these longer discussions off of a public facing channel. 21:16 So that is a great segue for connecting one on one. There are going to be parts of the conversation that just do not to be do not need to be felt public facing. Excuse me. 21:33 You need to go into more detail. You need to get more information from them. So depending on the channel that they're leaving the feedback, if it's a review, typically you're gonna have their email, so you should be able to reach out them one on one, you know, if it's in the social channel, phone call, and text, or social media direct message may be the the best way to connect with them in the first place and those are inherently more private. But, you know, email, we typically see the top and then you could ask for that opportunity to talk further. 22:11 So you can see in this research, thirty seven percent of shoppers expect that you would connect one zero one after leaving that negative review. 22:25 Okay. And now we're gonna talk about how do you prioritize the feedback? Positive reviews are an opportunity, but they are not as pressing as negative. And hopefully, you understand why. I mean, look, if you look at the statistic here twice as many shoppers who leave a positive review, say that the business doesn't need to respond back to them. 22:52 So our recommendation is typically that most five star reviews can be left alone. One thing I've seen clients do really well for five stars. 23:02 If you want to respond, you have the bandwidth to do that is usually if the customer shared something a little bit over and beyond, your typical review, maybe they create a successful a successful project or or or they they included a photo, of the cake they decorated those are opportunities to actually, like, be excited with them, show them that you're listening. 23:29 So I think you really have to have a customer care team who knows how to really read that scenario and understand, like, is this something where I'm gonna add value by responding to the five star? 23:43 And then similarly, you don't really want to be upselling them if they're happy. You don't want it to come off as, like, That's the only reason you're responding is to tell them about this other product that you have. I think, you know, if certainly if there was a product that didn't out for them and you can identify one that would be a better fit. That's great. 24:03 In terms of remembering the real audience, Bear in mind you're having that one to one response, but if this is public facing, everyone else is gonna see that response as well. And that's again why I think you want to if you're gonna respond to positive, have it be something where you're really adding that additional value. 24:25 And also many positive reviews also have themes for feedback or improvement. So someone may leave a four or five star review and give a caveat of this is great, but I wish they would fix the Velcro. 24:41 So it's still an opportunity to scour for additional insights. So, really, we want you to use the negative feedback for good. 24:56 It seems scary to get that that negative reaction to the product, but hopefully you saw some of these examples today how you can improve products like in the Verbo Day example, you can improve the description, like in the Linda Lakes recipe, update. 25:15 I think it's also an opportunity. We were just saying like helping coach your customer service teams for how to show that empathy or how to find that feedback and five star reviews. We've also seen clients who have been able to market new products based off of what they learn in the reviews. 25:35 So one of my favorite stories is we supported a client who made a gardening glove. And when they started reading their reviews, This gardening glove was being purchased by cyclists because they were great for cycling, and that company was actually able to use that and go to specialty stores to start selling their gloves and market them more towards cyclists. 26:01 The other thing, you know, of this list that I think is important is if you're seeing repeated questions, you were receiving repeated, repeated feedback in the reviews, look at your existing FAQ. If you have one, do you need to refine that so we can just avoid, avoid that for other shoppers moving forward? 26:23 And then lastly, you know, as I mentioned in the beginning, not all products are perfect, and sometimes among the other ways you're gonna to identify whether that product is is really meant to be on the shelf long term. 26:37 This could be a great way to validate that this product just really is not gonna continue to perform for the company. So if you remember nothing else from today, the three main things we want you to recall are you can find the positive side in some of this more constructive criticism or negative feedback don't ignore it because ultimately, you know, that is the way you're gonna protect your brand reputation. 27:11 Consumers are expecting this to be an exchange. They're expecting to feel listened to, and so don't invest in UGC without really thinking about how you're gonna sustain it long term. 27:26 And that's really my job as a client success director is to help my clients make sure they're considering all of these aspects of the program. 27:35 And then lastly, keep your replies short and sweet. We wanna make sure that you address the issue and you take anything that needs, like, longer commentary, take that to a one on one, like non public facing channel. 27:54 Okay. So how can bizarre voice help you? We talked through a lot today So I want to go through some of the solutions. 28:07 I'm gonna stop or start, excuse me, at the top right. With the connections offering that we have. So if you have a product that is sold in the retail channel, so let's say you have a product that's at the Home Depot or Lowe's or Walmart or Target, connections allows the brand or the manufacturer to respond to questions that a consumer asks on that retailer site, and we also have a premium offering where you can respond to the reviews that are left for your products. In the retail channel. 28:50 So back to we looked at that example of a response to a one star review If your product received a one star review with one of the retailers we support, your team would have an interface to go in and respond to that review. That's the premium offering. We actually allow responses to questions as a free offering. So if you are not taking advantage of that today, please follow-up with us because it's a great opportunity for you as the expert in your products to respond in the retail channel. 29:31 So related to that, ratings are abused one of our core offerings. If you are a brand, a brand tailor, or a retailer, and you don't have readings and reviews on your site. 29:44 Hopefully, you saw today that this is a primary mechanism to get insights about your products and services and really have the ability to analyze those reviews for insights. 30:00 Q and A, similarly, it's a great fit, for brands, brand tailors, or retailers. On on your site so that if a customer doesn't see the information that they need, they have a channel to do that. 30:17 This is an additional conversion driver. It helps with SEO. It helps uncover additional insights. So ratings and reviews in Q and A work really well together in tandem. 30:29 And the last that you're seeing here on the top left is our premium network insights. So we are excited to offer this now. And in addition to, the insights we offer, brings reviews in Q and A, premium network insights actually is allowing you to see how are your products performing in the retail channel? 30:54 Which is great because we've heard from so many clients. It can be really hard to synthesize that information when it lives in all these different sites. 31:02 So this is a great place to understand how you're performing at various retailers we can actually show you pros and cons using natural language processing for what are consumers saying in the retail channel about those products and then probably some of my brain clients, they loved this idea of being able to see how are they doing relative to competitors in the retail channel? 31:30 So that's all available within premium network insights And if you have any questions, we can get you connected with someone on the bizarre voice side. But hopefully this has given you a lot to think through. 31:44 If you're using some of this today and you wanna refine your solution, or if you're just this is gonna be your first foray into user generating content, we're here to help. 31:58 So now we will pivot to the Q and A and I already see some questions that are coming through in the chat. We'll take, just a few minutes so everyone has opportunity to ask those questions and then we will dive into the live q and a.
