When you are online shopping do you take the time to read the reviews? Are they typically helpful during your shopping experience, or do you prefer to take the plunge and click "buy" without the consumer insight? The following article about Amazon shows us that they were one of the pioneers in using these customer reviews to draw in more business. In giving consumers a sounding board they created an opportunity for buy in and ownership. It allowed Amazon to give better service to their customers with the ability to hear exactly what the issues might be or which products people were unhappy about. We thought that this was a great tie in to the pieces that we read for class this week.
Another thing to think about is how this might relate to the popularity of social networking and how might we all try to incorporate this into our ideas for our value propositions and final projects?
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_43/b4152047039565.htm
This is another interesting article that we found that talked a little about ways that a company can incentivize their customers and in turn create a free work force to promote their business.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43344769/ns/business-local_business/
This article really hits home. In fact, there has not been a single major purchase over the last three years that I haven't first scoured the internet for critical reviews before buying. I am a little wary of the customer reviews, as they often seem fairly shot from the hip. I tend to go with professional sites such as CNET when looking for my information.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly this does seem to relate directly to the article about the non-paying customer ("What's a free customer worth"). Since anyone can post a review of a product, and the high number of reviews is what brings significant value, it is the non-paying customer that is really generating a lot of the site traffic and revenue.
As far as how we could incorporate this into our project, all we have to do is google our product/service with the word "review" after it, and we'll get dozen (or hundreds) of reviews about what other companies are doing. From these we can pick out the good and the bad and apply them to our own model.
You pose an excellent and topical question. I personally rely heavily on reviews when making online purchasing decisions. I am confident that collaborative consumption is "the" way to go because I trust the collective wisdom with the well-informed consumers in today's marketplace.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't do justice to Rachel Botsman by trying to paraphrase her, but she recently gave a Ted talk on this subject for anybody else who may be interested: http://www.ted.com/talks/rachel_botsman_the_case_for_collaborative_consumption.html
Great Article. I have found myself relying more and more on customer reviews when shopping for items that I am both buying online or in person. Besides the obvious reason's of getting an unbiased opinion of the product by "real unpaid" customers, I feel that the real value to the company selling the product is that they can essentially get thousands of hits with feedback on why the customer's like and dislike the product. Using this unfiltered information, the company can work to enhance the value that the product gives the customer.
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't surprise me that retail sites that offer these reviews, of which are from helpful and educated consumers, are successful in sales. I imagine that there is a certain sense of security buying a product where you can get feedback before purchasing...I know it works for me.
Interestingly enough, I don't use the reviews on Amazon.com. I tend to read reviews on other sites like Consumer Reports, CNET, etc., then purchase items on Amazon.com based on price.
ReplyDeleteI wonder how reliable the reviews for products are. What safeguards are in place to ensure that companies and manufacturers aren't pimping their own products under the alias of a "consumer" persona? Is this just another tactic as part of the marketing strategy of a company?
What about sites like Angie's List? True, unbiased reviews are hard to come by. But, Angie's List seems to have the recipe for reviews in the service industry.
Excellent topic, very relevant to our exploration of the current market that is driven by the consumer value and consumer experience. It is good to look at this as a tool and view it from both the consumer perspective, as well as, the company perspective.
ReplyDeleteAs a consumer, I do look at customer comments occasionally, but tend to feel that I am lacking enough information to determine if the source is relevant and aligns with my needs and values. I dont know if my expectation is similar to the consumer commenting and this adjusts the value I give the feedback. The more I know about the consumer rather than just their opinion of a product or experience, the more valuable it is to me. This may be why many commented that they often rely more on well known consumer review sites, such as Consumer reports. I think we feel more confident knowing how the results are measured.
As a company, the feedback alone is very valuable in shaping strategy and delivering the desired experience. Interacting directly with the consumer, whomever it may be, is more important than ever. More and more companies need to participate in their own experience as consumers and producers forge ahead in this time of co-produced business.
I do use customer reviews to bolster my current view and push me over the purchasing cliff, or to pull in the reigns. However what I often find in the reviews is less than helpful. The three kinds of typical reviews I see:
ReplyDelete1) Worst product ever.
2) Greatest product ever.
3) Middle of the road and not very helpful.
That being said instead of reading the reviews I look at the numerical data almost exclusively, i.e. this product is rated by users as 4.3 out of 5, when making my buying decision.
I think there great potential if a company could cull through all the 'reviews' and boil down the data into useful nuggets (which may already exist but I haven't seen it on the sites I use) such as:
There are 743 reviews with an average score of 4.3 out of 5:
1) 425 found this product to work as advertised/described
2) 357 found this product to exceed their needs
3) 114 people who reviewed the product poorly did so based on personal preference but said the product did solve their problem.
4) 31 had difficultly using the product or it didn't work in their situation.
5) 14 people returned this product and received satisfaction from the dealer.
6) 5 people ended up discarding the product and no receiving any type of refund.
7) You could make a number of different topics that might be interesting – 27 people found this to be one of the 10 best products they have purchased this year, etc.
My most often purchased product is audiobooks and I have found the individual reviews to be less than helpful as they seem to typically be more opinions on the topic, or polarized readers, as opposed to an objective analysis of the content or the reader. In general if a book has a lot of reviews the number scale of 1-5 seems to work pretty well.
I also use the reviews before making any significant purchases. However, there are lot of occasions when I can not decide on the product quality reading the reviews. On these occasions, one or more reviews that rate the product extremely poor and there are few reviews that rate the product as excellent. In such cases, I simply walk away from that product and explore alternatives, if alternatives are available.
ReplyDeleteFor every product, there will always be a certain percentage of the population who would not be satisfied or may have a negative experience with that product. And statistically, people with negative experiences are more likely to write a negative review than people who have a ok experience and even people who had extremely positive experience. So a positive review counts much more than several negative reviews.
These reviewers are essentially "free" marketers for products and services and has large network value for the companies. So companies should not only pay attention to the reviewers who had negative experience by resolving their issues in a fair and expedient manner, it is even more important to reward the reviewers who had positive or balanced review of their products. This way there will be incentives from users with both good and bad experience to post a review -- and the more reviews there are, the more factual the review becomes. And for the companies, attracting more positive reviewers brings more sales.