In a recent half-hour InternetRetailing webinar, How to embed the customer’s voice throughout your organisation, we heard from Barry Furby, retail strategy director at Bazaarvoice and Luke Kelland, senior customer generated content manager at Sainsbury’s Argos.
Here’s a bulletpoint overview of the event.
- Barry Furby and Luke Kelland started with an overview of Bazaarvoice (15-year-old software company collecting user-generated ratings, reviews and other content, syndicated across a network that includes 6,500 brands and wholesalers) and Sainsbury’s Digital (four websites: Sainsbury’s, Argos, Tu and Habitat, all underpinned by the Nectar customer loyalty programme).
The modern consumer
- Price, quality, trust remain important for shoppers, factors include personalisation, convenience, social and health consciousness now emerging: 65% trust product reviews over other types of media, said Barry Furby of Bazaarvoice.
- Expectations shifting: coming from the convenience and immediacy offered by non-retail players such as Uber.
- “It’s about validating that trust and reassuring that there’s a good purchase to be made”.
- Role of ratings and reviews in discover/consider/decide/buy/champion cycle.
- How Argos customers engage with it through the year. WITH GRAPHS
- 71% engage with the business through mobile.
- At any one time, 66% of customers arrive through organic search or search engines.
- Customers who have left a review make more orders across more categories over the year. Luke Kelland of Sainsbury’s Digital: “We believe that customers who create content go on to become more valuable customers”. WITH GRAPHS
- Similar results from those who click or tap on user-generated content (JGC).
- Kelland: “Customers who experience content place more orders, spend more per order and have a higher likelihood to convert.”
Customer content framework
- Graph illustrates strategies retailers can use to encourage customers to engage, embed, and advocate around UGC. WITH EXAMPLES
- Engage phase: revenue, acquisition experience. Furby: “You need brilliant basics in place to set you up for success to be able to drive further along the maturity curve and start embedding the customer voice in the business.”
- Embed phase: brand awareness, insight, engaging suppliers: “works particularly well for gifting, where you can be creative with choosing the range that is engaging” “There’s a real opportunity for retailers to partner with their supplier brands… to really drive review volume and provide that reassurance around new product launches.”
- Advocate phase: loyalty, consumer centric. Integration into business intelligence tools, helping to inform decisions. “There’s an element where leveraging and building a community can feed into gamification.” Uploading photos, Q&As, engaging with other customers.
UGC excellence: what this looks like for Argos
- Aims: is to remove barriers to purchase, to improve product discovery and create value for brands.
- Twofold strategy: enable customers to create and experience content; UGC can help answer the question: is this product right for me?
- Examples of Sainsbury’s UGC programme: how Tu clothing fits, how Sainsbury’s items are rates, Argos testers programme.
- The webinar closed with a summary of key learnings and a Q&A.
- Click here to watch the Bazaarvoice webinar again, including the slides and the Q&A. Click here to explore InternetRetailing’s other webinars.
