0:00 Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. I'm speaking to you from bizarre voice, where we're going to be taking you through the 2022 omnibus survival guide for retailers and brands. 0:12 My name is Nicole Kimble. I'm the vice president of retail for EMEA here at bazaar voice. And I'll be joined by my colleague, Annika Sanchez. 0:21 Nice to meet everybody this morning. I am a staff content strategist, consultant for EMEA. I have worked with the tsar voice for 13 years in various roles, but always in moderation and authenticity. 0:39 Great Thanks. And Annika. So before we get into it, just a couple of housekeeping items. If anyone has any questions, just please feel free to share them on the chat and we'll make sure that the end of the content will be walking through everyone's questions and providing some detail or into any of the queries that you might have. 0:59 So as we get into it. We're here to really talk about one key thing that is of the utmost importance to us and to, I think, everyone on this call. 1:11 And it's authenticity. We know there's a growing distrust of the internet and news, but, you know, there's a growing distrust of reviews, too, from a survey of 10,000 consumers across the us, u.k., France, Germany and Australia. 1:26 Almost 3/4 feel the retail industry needs a new set of standards to combat fake reviews. As the internet's power grows. 1:34 How do companies practice corporate responsibility and ensure they're using that power for good? How do they maintain customer loyalty in an age of growing mistrust? 1:43 And that's something we're going to hopefully solve or at least talk through in the next 30 minutes. Why is authenticity important to us? 1:56 Well, it's so important to earn consumer's trust, and authenticity is the cornerstone of that. Consumers are telling us they trust reviews first and foremost. 2:04 Peer to peer credibility is at its highest ever. Over 3/4 of shoppers trust other customer reviews, compared to only 33% who trust information directly from a brand. 2:17 In fact, around 82% of shoppers say they won't buy from a brand they don't trust, and 62% choose products based on a brand reputation. 2:25 So the stakes have never been higher for retailers and brands to get it right when it comes to building an authentic voice their customers can rely on. Which brings us to the core of what we're here today about, and that's around the omnibus directive. 2:43 Government authorities worldwide have begun to recognize the potential risks to consumers and have begun to address the issues around review content through this new legislation. 2:53 In may of this year, the European Union released a directive to refresh existing consumer law to be more relevant to today's digital needs. Key portions of this include unfair commercial practices, consumer rights, unfair contract terms and price indicators. 3:09 So we'll make recommendations as to how your system should be set up to be compliant. The onus is on our clients to look at the details here, which will be shared with you throughout this presentation and following it, and help us work with you to set additional safeguards for you in conjunction with your legal teams perspective. 3:30 We work closely with our client's legal teams to answer any questions based on their understanding of the regulation. But we're going to talk through our understanding, our perspective and how we're delivering a compliant and safe, authentic experience for our customers. 3:45 And I hand it over to you to talk a bit more about what omnibus is. Thank you, Nicole. So a bit more in detail about the omnibus directive. 3:55 It's a new piece of EU legislation which intends to better protect consumers from false and misleading reviews in online commerce. 4:05 It aims to do this by creating additional transparency obligations for companies to follow, and it stipulates the following. 4:14 One it must be clear to consumers, whether a review of a product originates from a user who has actually purchased and/or used the product to companies that publish reviews must explain what verification mechanisms it has in place for this. 4:32 It must be transparent on whether reviews are checked to ensure that the review originates from a buyer or user of the reviewed product. 4:42 Three if an authenticity check takes place, information must be provided on how it is checked. And then last, it must be transparently disclosed on whether such reviews are incentivized. 4:57 Talking about fines, the directive allows for GDPR style fines worth a minimum of 4% of the company's annual turnover in the relevant member state, or 2 million if a calculation is not possible. 5:13 Member states can introduce their own threshold and fines which could exceed recommendations. And a bit about the transparency process. 5:23 Companies must provide information on their criteria for ranking search results. Justify steps to ensure the reviews on their site are indeed genuine and authentic. 5:36 Our voice interprets the law to mean that clients need to take steps to verify that the user has direct experience with the product and is therefore a verified user and then display that information to other consumers. 5:51 We do not interpret this as only verified reviews can be displayed. Organic reviews as well. And how did it all come about? 6:08 So the driver behind the directive was that in January of this year, 2022, the FTC issued a $4.2 million fine to Fashion Nova for not displaying negative sentiments and cherry picking. 6:23 This news was certainly a wake up call to the industry and scared quite a few of our retailers and brands. I'd like to point out that Fashion Nova is not a client of bazaar voice. 6:34 And again, we don't work with companies who want to censure reviews. We actually very much welcome the directive and any other regulations globally. 6:45 The czar voice has always had a really good relationship with the FTC and we have helped consult them when it comes to collection and display of reviews. 6:57 So what does that compliance look like for us? Let's talk a bit about moderation. 7:06 Our moderators don't have access to PII personally identifiable information or where review comes from in accordance with GDPR and other privacy regulations. 7:17 But we will tag and reject a review in which a reviewer states or implies they don't have any direct experience with the product and review and/or haven't purchased it. 7:30 Neither is hearsay accepted with the exception of parents being able to write a review for their minor children. So for instance, if a review says my sister bought this and she loves it, that would be considered hearsay, not direct experience. 7:48 Our authenticity policy is currently being updated and clients can find this update in a bazaar voice knowledge base. 7:58 We have several ways of batching in. Stay with me here. We have verified purchaser batch that's tracked for all reviews, submitted via pie posting, direct interaction, email or SMS review collection process. 8:13 And it's displayed on reviews. Incentivized reviewed batch a product specifically contextual badges allows clients to guarantee a user is verified to write a specialized type of review on a given product or category. 8:31 Example an expert program. We also display a employee badge. If a consumer works for a particular client. 8:41 Incentivized review data is available and passed through our host of display platforms. The display is currently limited to a line of text appended to the beginning of the review, easily viewable by everyone. 8:56 Influence reviews that are part of sampling campaigns include an incentivized review batch when syndicated online sites and clients can set batches up in their configuration hub Workbench settings. 9:10 These can be automated as well by existing processes. Example using an URL can use a user token or question on the submission form. 9:22 And then for syndicated content. Verified purchaser batch is also currently syndicated and available to clients for display, and this is accompanied by an additional batch showing where exactly the review was originally placed. 9:39 A bit more about fraud detection. It truly is bizarre. Forces claim to define the gold standard in terms of trust and authenticity of reviews, and that not just since the omnibus directive, but for many, many years since the tsar voice started collecting reviews 17 years ago. 10:01 Besides a robust authenticity process which utilizes tools commonly used by financial institutions, they take a holistic approach to verifying the validity of a review. 10:13 And I will explain a bit more about that in the next slide in an attempt to support clients who collect organic reviews, bv is looking into some adjustments to the review submission form, possibly an extra tick box, which simply asks the reviewer if they have used or bought the product. 10:36 Well, it's not completely a clear position on verification. It certainly demonstrates a sentiment that we have tried to verify whether the product was used or purchased. 10:48 This is not an explicit request of omnibus, but our voice is always gone a bit further than necessary. 11:01 So what is not within the scope of moderation or basically what is handled by our authenticity process? 11:10 First of all, clients cannot alter, edit or cherry pick based on sentiments and Bazaarvoice uses some of the same tools used to stop payment fraud. 11:22 These tools enable us to write rules and influence scoring models that reject unacceptable content automatically or queue it up for manual review. 11:32 So our mix of technology and manual review enables us to identify unacceptable content when it's received, and it prevents content like it from getting through in the future by looking at a piece of content, data, signals and text. 11:50 Our authenticity agents can identify patterns. They compare historical content. They make informed decisions then about whether content is unacceptable. 12:01 We maintain our high standards by employing a stringent quality assurance process and setting aggressive targets for our agents. 12:10 Again, we go above and above, above and beyond. And some of the product particulars are device fingerprints, IP, geolocation, email addresses, other data signals. 12:22 And we do have a membership with MRC. So I've already talked about batching a little bit, but I would like to reiterate and explain in further detail. 12:42 Again about the verified purchaser batch. This batch is displayed for all reviews that are verified via the below pi post, interaction, email or SMS process. 12:55 A verified purchaser batch will only be displayed on reviews when a consumer has gone through this route to submit a review. 13:03 This batch is syndicated and displayed on partner sites alongside review and an indication of where the review was originally placed. 13:13 And then a bit more about incentivized reviews. So clients have the ability to tag relevant reviews with an incentivized review batch, and this can again be set up for you to configure and it is displayed. 13:27 If the consumer confirms that the product was a free incentivized item upon review submission, or if it was part of, say, a sampling campaign. 13:37 When syndicated. This is displayed in the form of text, again appended to the start of a review. Syndicated influence reviews will also display an incentivized batch when a review is submitted as part of an influencer sampling campaign. 13:55 About terms and conditions compliance. So clients do have the ability to place a teensy tick box via their config hub. 14:04 And when this is enabled, this is displayed on the review submission form and a customer must stick this box complying to the TNC in order to submit a review, clients are able to include additional copy, adding terms that firm up their compliance with omnibus. 14:24 And when we talk about post interactive email and SMS review collection, it is clear that a consumer indeed has purchased the product. 14:37 Over to you, Nicole. Great so as retailers and brands are evolving and making adjustments to comply with changing regulation, it is imperative that the bigger picture and needs are maintained. 14:51 Taking extreme and unnecessary action by a presumptive removal of what are compliant reviews but actually have a negative impact on the consumer experience which this regulation is hoping to empower. 15:04 As already stated, shoppers today rely on review content to convert with confidence. 60% of them look for products with the highest volume of reviews. 15:14 So in short, customers want a voluminous amount of content that is clear, transparent and authentic. So this can often mean to achieving volume as content is going to be using a number of different content collection methods. 15:34 One of the areas that comes up quite a bit in conversations with clients is they're on incentivized reviews. And enabling a robust volume of content. 15:44 This now needs to span the breadth of the catalog. Incentivize reviews are actually viewed as trustworthy and impactful to consumers versus other review types. 15:55 Any negative correlation is a misconception, and extensive analysis has indicated that there's actually a quantifiable, net positive impact on consumer conversion. 16:04 As a case study that was our voice did with Under Armour actually showed that the incentivized reviews saw plus 0.44% lifting conversion when compared to products that did not have incentivized reviews and only leveraged organic review type. 16:20 So this demonstrates there's actually a benefit to ensuring that max volume and that consumers actually see a positive when it comes to incentive reviews and that's shown through the conversion that's demonstrated. 16:35 Back to you, Annika. Yes so there are many reasons to be positive. I mean, first of all, content is overwhelmingly positive that we receive. 16:46 As you can see here, 76% of reviews are five stars and then we have 17%, four stars. 16:55 And literally, if we go down, only 4% of reviews actually contain one star. The average star rating globally for all clients is 4.54% That being said, I actually love negative reviews. 17:16 There are several advantages to reading negative reviews. Just because a product isn't right for one person doesn't mean it isn't right for anyone. 17:27 If I read in a review about a resort that it was absolutely boring and quiet and there was nobody on the beach, you can be assured, I am there. 17:40 Another thing is that the clients can see the exact issues consumers are having with their products and whether there are flaws, and then they can use that information in that sentiment for informed product development. 17:55 Consumers, as you can see here, do not trust sites. No negative content. 35% of consumers say they are distrustful of sites with only positive content. 18:08 And I think if we only query with our voice employees, that percentage goes up to 100% In the end, suppressing your clients ability to convey negative sentiments, to express their subjective opinion. 18:25 It doesn't change the way they feel if that review is rejected. It just changes your ability to engage with your own consumers. 18:35 So again, negative sentiment does play a part, an important part of the review collection process. Great so that's a lot of information to unpack. 18:52 And I think one of the key ways to look at this is to really put yourself in your customer's shoes when interacting online. What protection does a consumer expect the business to take? 19:02 How can we ensure this does not have an unnecessary impact on their other needs in the retail environment? So while we want to be making sure we're giving them authentic, transparent content that shouldn't come at the expense of enabling that content for them, the Xbox has long been adhering to the tenets of authenticity and omnibus. 19:21 We don't aspire to be only as good as the other e-commerce software providers, but we think about how we choose to contribute to the overall trust and mistrust of information that's out there. 19:33 And if we just want to now quickly just recap some of the key takeaways we've just talked through consumers mindset. Everything we do from the regulation to actually working with the ratings and reviews provider is all in the intent of serving your customer. 19:48 But it's going to be important to help your service provider enable the best practices for you as a brand or retailer when it comes to user generated content. 19:56 And then a legal compliance should be a minimum goal. It goes far beyond that to make sure that you're getting not just getting compliant content to your customer, but the right content, the right amount of content and speaking to them when it matters most for you as a business, that confirms off on just the key takeaways and an overview of omnibus. 20:18 So we will go to the questions now from the audience. So we do have a couple of questions. So the first one is what is the difference between organic and incentivized reviews? 20:30 Well, that is a great question, and I know we touched on it a little bit here, but to really be clear for everyone on the call is that incentivized reviews are those reviews that typically involves getting a product in a consumer's hand, typically as a sampling basis or as a free product offer in which they're then going to test trial the product and then deliver reviews. 20:55 This is a great advantage to retailers to really get products into the hands of targeted consumers that are most valuable to them, whether it's relevant to the community that they serve. 21:08 And so forth. Organic reviews typically will be based on that. Someone has just gone onto the site and typically just left a review. 21:16 So it takes on the nature where it's a bit more proactive and natural versus actually getting the product into the consumer's hands. We talked about, though, in the session that there's actually no true difference between how consumers perceive these reviews. 21:31 We do see that incentivized reviews are still honest and authentic. There's a misconception that they might lend themselves to being overtly positive, which is not the case. 21:40 It's really the people are going to be leading honest review content based on their experiences with the product, regardless of whether it was a purchased product or something that was given to them through an incentivized program. 21:53 The second question is, does all of our view content go through moderation? So, atika, I'll let you take that one. Is that definitely in your world of moderation? 22:02 Absolutely, Yes. A sound. Yes all content is being moderated. And we have a very robust moderation system, which consists of both NLP, natural language processing or maybe simply put machine moderation, which includes algorithms and keyword models, etc., et cetera. 22:27 It's proprietary and in copyright, it's systems within bazaar voice in combination with a moderation team that consists of about 250 to 300 human moderators. 22:45 All of us are voice employees. There are some industries that are moderated only by human moderators, mainly industries that are highly regulated, such as infant formula, nicotine products, pharmaceuticals, OTC or medical devices, etc., et cetera but every single piece of content is going through moderation. 23:18 Even if a client had a previous provider and was moderated via different platform, bazaar voice will re moderate the content of the migration. 23:33 And so yes, I think that is it great? And then we have one more question. Why do bazaar voice customers want to syndicate reviews across other websites? 23:47 If we go back to some of the points we talked about, we talked about volume of content, 60% of shoppers tend to gravitate towards the products with the most reviews. 23:57 And we also talked about how having various different content collection methods is important for a retailer, whether it's or brand, whether you're doing incentivized programs, relying on organic reviews or through post office interaction emails. 24:11 But the reality is not everyone is going to leave a review regardless of the collection type. So the twofold benefit for a retailer is by enabling syndicated content into their site from the bazaar boys brand network, they're ensuring that volume is there. 24:28 So there's going to be no gaps won from the breadth of their catalog that they're going to be able to maximize and get as much content. 24:37 Against their product catalog that's going to be relevant for their shoppers to address one ensuring that. Our products have reviews and to that the volume is there and it's also ensuring there's going to be a constant flow recency to that review content that's syndicated. 24:53 Review content is also going to go through the moderation process and all those quality and authenticity assurances that Annika has walked through. 25:02 From a brand perspective, it's really important for brands as well. They do, even if they have their own DTC site, they heavily rely on sales through third party retailers and to be able to ensure that their product has coverage and has that review content rather than relying on the methods deployed by just the retailer themselves, is also important for them. 25:22 So it's a very symbiotic relationship that a retailer is going to want to make sure that they have that brand content to win that shopper, not get them going somewhere else to look for that content, but also for the brand to make sure that the retailer is enabling that. 25:36 And that content is there for the shopper to consider and convert with confidence. So just look it looks like that is all of the questions that we have. 25:48 We thank you, everyone, for the time. We'll be also following up the session later in the summer or early September, doing some versions as it pertains to Europe. 26:00 So we'll be doing a session within German language and French as well for anyone on the call that may feel that might be relevant for them or a colleague. So we thank you so much. 26:08 If there's any additional questions, please feel free to reach out to our voice and we're happy to discuss more as needed. So thank you very much, everyone. 26:19 Thank you so much and have a great rest of the day.
