It’s cheering to see the number of flowers that are ordered for Mothering Sunday.  For the last two years Mothering Sundays  Flying Flowers have been members of Feefo, and, a week after the event there has been a massive surge of feedback - many thousands of comments in a day, which far outpaces days such as Valentine Day.

Of course, you could say that it’s a sad reflection of how many people cannot get to see their mothers on that day, so have to send flowers by courier instead, but my reading is still that we love our mums.  It’s also creditable that Flying Flowers’ feedback rating remains at 93%  over a period that must stretch their resources hard.  I can think of few businesses where it is more difficult to assure the quality of your product when delivered.

Take a look at the Flying Flowers feedback.

For some time now, we have had the option on Feefo for suppliers to set up back-links from Feefo feedback directly to the relevant product page on their site.  However, for some suppliers, this has been difficult,as the only changeable part of the link has been the product code.  So we’ve been able to link simply to those sites where the product page has a URL such as ‘http://mysite.com/displayproduct/<productcode>, but not where additional information is needed.

We have rectified this now by allowing suppliers to send us a product link with each sale.  Instead of inserting the product code into a pre-defined link on hte supplier file, we can use the product link that’s been sent to us with the sale.  In this way, we can link back to any site that can send us the product page links for individual products.

We’ve been steadily adding reports to the Feefo system, and I strongly advise those who have access to them to look through them - particularly if you are categorising your feedback.  The ‘Key Reports’ menu is the most important.

But today I want to draw attention to three simple reports that we’ve just added, all on the ‘Miscellaneous reports’ menu, until we can think of a better place for them.

The first is a simple Traffic Report that shows you, on a daily basis, how many emails we’ve sent on your behalf, and how many ratings we’ve received back.   The second is a list of most of the Emails that have Bounced.   This should be handy for cleaning up your customer lists, though we cannot be comprehensive as different servers respond in individual ways to emails that cannot be delivered.  The last is a list of those Customers who have ‘Opted-out’ of receiving Feefo emails.   There may be an implication that these people don’t want to receive emails from our suppliers either.

These are not reports that will be central to your business, but we hope that they’ll be useful ‘fringe’ benefits of Feefo membership

Feefo has now been ‘rich snippet’ compliant for a couple of months.    I discovered, rather late in the day, that we needed to inform Google that we were compliant so that they would assess the site for suitability to display the rich snippets.

Since then,  Google has not yet displayed our rich snippets on their listings, which is very frustrating.   I have tried a couple of times to get some idea of a timescale between letting them know of our compatibility and their recognition, but, as generally with Google, queries like this fall into a black hole.

I can fully understand why a vast business such as Google wants to restrict the number of queries it handles, but it it encourages us all to a particular course of action in the belief that we are promoting Google’s agenda, I wish that they’d make an effort to let us know what’s happening.

I’ve been encouraging all our clients to get their own sites ‘rich snippet compliant’.  It is indisputable that the presence of genuine independent reviews on any site must give it some precedence on search engine rankings, if the search engine is doing its job properly.  But it worries me that I may be asking my clients to make an effort when the return may be a long time coming.

Last week we were given a great idea by friends at Actinic - why not let customers leaving feedback spread the word through Facebook and Twitter?

This is stunningly clever on two counts.  From the point of view of the customer, if he or she is keen to tell the world their opinion of some product or service they’ve received, there are lots of times when they’d like to tell their friends particularly.  When I started Feefo, I was thinking of all the times that I’d received particularly good service, and would have been delighted to have told my friends.  But it is also generally good for our suppliers, who get the good news about their customer commitment spread in the most authoritative way possible - friend to friend.

Doubters suggest to me that, of course, this is also a very effective way of spreading bad news.  This is true.  However bad news spreads anyway, and the links that we put on the Facebook content bring those who are interested straight back to the general feedback page for the supplier with the particular feedback highlighted.  Customers’ friends thus get a chance to see what everybody else thinks, as well as seeing the supplier’s response to the complaint.

We’ll be monitoring how many people use the Facebook link, and what comments are being distributed, as well as which of their friends bother to investigate further.  I’ll follow up when we have enough data.

So far we have implemented the first part of our Facebook interface.  After leaving feedback, everybody is asked ‘Would you like to let your frends on Facebook know of your feedback?’, and have the usual Facebook button to press.  Shortly we’ll be arranging to let suppliers distribute the feedback though their own Facebook sites, and we’ll fix a feed to Twitter.

We are told that Google is about to change its algorithm to give a much higher priority to reviews.  Good for them.  Even if it’s simply a matter of adding ‘reviews’ to their list of ‘images, maps, etc’, it will be another step in making Google really useful.  If it’s a matter of reordering their standard search, then that’s, from the point of view of Feefo, even better.

In either case, it should make internet traders much more keen to show reviews on their sites.  But these reviews will only be noticed by Google if the HTML for the pages includes the ‘rich snippets’ that Google specified as long ago as May, and which it now hopes to use to identify reviews.

Feefo has these on the feedback pages on our site.   We’ve also prepared an XML feed to our clients’ sites which will automatically generate ‘rich snippets’ on their sites, but our customers are being slow to recognize the great importance of acting on this (it would take very little time indeed for them to adapt their sites to let Google see the reviews for what they are).   This worries us, as we want our clients to benefit from having highly credible reviews in quantity posted on their sites.  The only comforting factor is that Google has a site designed to test pages for ‘rich snippets’ and we have put through, unsuccessfully, a number of pages containing reviews which do not originate from Feefo.   It seems that our competitors are even slower than our customers to pick up this important development

How Bazaarvoice & Feefo Differ

This comment is for the benefit of any reader who may happen to run one of the bigger sites on the web!  Many of such businesses we approach have heard of Bazaarvoice, but never heard of us. For those of you who have never heard of Bazaarvoice, let me give a brief introduction.

Bazaarvoice is an onsite feedback system. Many of the bigger businesses that allow site users to register and make comments about their products are using the system developed by then. They have spent a great deal of money marketing their feedback system, which is why insiders know their name, while they may not know ours. But this may make people believe that we are simply another version of Bazaarvoice.

This is a very long way from the truth, so I thought that I had better tell everyone the differences

First and foremost, Bazaarvoice is a blog insofar as there is no screening of who is making comments. You or I can go onto any site using Bazaarvoice, and make any comment we feel like about any product regardless of whether we have tried it or not. The product manager can also, if he wishes, make comments.. Although there is no reason to suppose that most of the comments are not genuine, this fact alone, together with the ‘moderation’ which Bazaarvoice applies to the feedback, destroys any notion that these comments are certifiably unbiased.

Feefo, on the other hand, is specifically and absolutely designed to be unbiased. The comments appear on an independent website, all comments are from customers, and all customers are invited to comment. No comments are removed except if they are profane libellous, or contain personal or business details that are inappropriate, and, in the very few cases where we have edited a comment (apart from removing personal details) we say so as part of the comment.

These fundamental differences result in many smaller differences.

1. Feefo claims, and can support the claim, to engender customer trust. Our brand enhances the brand of our customers. It does so by ensuring that every customer of a supplier is able to leave unedited feedback through an independent party. To prove that we are independent, we ask the supplier to put our logo on their site. It is noteworthy that brands such as Thomas Pink, which are very highly regarded, are happy to put our brand name in the centre of their product pages (on the new site to be launched shortly).
2. The feedback on our site is transaction based. It is extremely difficult to tie in ‘blog’ comments to transactions (comments such as ‘I have not received my order’ can thus be very time-consuming). Customers of Feefo say that “match back” to the customer is a vital differentiator.
3. Feefo encourages customers to mention the service values of the supplier. This means that any lapse in service comes to the notice of the supplier almost immediately. Suppliers who have joined Feefo with gaps in their service have quickly improved their ratings, often reducing the negatives by over 50% in the first six months.
4. Feefo encourages a conversation. In general, we ask our suppliers to ensure that they reply to negative feedback within two hours. This is a very strong tool for customer retention. Bazaarvoice has no intrinsic ‘reply’ facility
5. Feefo raises many more comments than Bazaarvoice, because we are asking people to comment on specific transactions about products they have received.
6. Our reporting system is said to be better. In particular, we are producing reports which will flag up any event that requires the attention of managers on a daily basis
7. We are far cheaper. The business model adopted by Bazaarvoice requires an army of ‘moderators’ as well as an even larger army of salesmen and marketers, so they have to charge prices that are many times what we charge.

In short, Bazaarvoice claims to increase sales through adding feedback facilities to a supplier site. Feefo claims to make businesses better by letting them talk to their customers and promote their brand values in public.

Anyone who is starting a business wants it to be successful.   When I sold trampolines, I wanted to sell as many as possible, and now I want Feefo to be adopted by as many as possible.   But, in almost every business, there are other reasons why the managers want its success.

These reasons are almost always related to some slight but positive social effect.   So, when I sold trampolines, I liked to think of the pleasure that these excellent toys gave the children who used them, of the exercise that I was promoting, and of the bonding effect that trampolines have on children who use them simultaneously (despite clear instructions that they should only be used by one person at a time).

So it is with Feefo,  but the case for Feefo as a social good is far more compelling.

The internet is now, with startling speed, in most households round the world.  The prime use is to send and receive emails, the second use is for shopping, and the third is as a provider of information.  Note the order of importance.

In all three uses, the major problem with the internet is oversupply.   There are millions of spam emails,  you can buy almost anything from hundreds of different sources, and there are millions of websites commenting on every conceivable subject.  The success of Google has been that it applies some sort of quality control to both information providers and suppliers, so that there is some hope  (though not certainty) that you will find a supplier or information that you want differentiated from the mass of junk.

But the internet also provides the opportunity for the best type of quality control possible to purchasers.  How better can a business be judged than by asking the existing customers whether they are satisfied?   Before the internet this would have required the information - if it were collected - to be placed in some location that would have needed to be visited (or placed in a book that would need to have been purchased), neither of which was quick or convenient for prospective buyers.   Now, there’s no reason why it should not be immediately available to thosee prospects.

This is why sites such as TripAdviser have been so successful.   But who gets to write the reviews on TripAdviser?   I know of one case where an ex-employee has written a review of a hostelry in which he says that the place  has gone to the dogs since he left.   Could the owner of the hostely respond?  It turns out that she could not - trip adviser considered her reply too contentious.  The result is that she has a negative review from someone who was never a customer, to which she cannot reply.

Briefly, Feefo solves this problem entirely.  There is only one uncontestable way of collecting reviews.  This is to allow a third party to ask all your customers for comments on an independent site, and to be allowed to reply.  It doesn’t entirely guarantee the authenticity of the comment, but it goes a long way towards it.

If Feefo succeeds, then, in a few years time, customers will rightly ask, of any supplier that does not have independent feedback, why they don’t.  And the internet will be a safer place to do business.

In this morning’s paper is a story about someone who took a package trip to Tunisia which he found very disappointing.   Getting no reply from the package operator, he started a ‘rant’ blog, which was read by 10,000 people.   Pointing this out to Thompson, they refunded him, saying that they apologized that they had not responded to him within 28 days.

Good for him.   I have no idea whether the company misrepresented the holiday, but I am entirely familiar with the anger and frustration of not getting a response to a complaint. (One particularly infuriating company in my case was Webex, a provider of ‘internet office facilities’ - I still cannot resist naming them).

But once again, the news makes the case for Feefo stronger.    If Thompson had been using Feefo, the customer would have had an obvious forum to make his case.  Thompson would have had mechanisms in place to respond to  him within a couple of days rather than four weeks, and they would never have been put in the embarrassing position whereby a complaint by one person is seen first by 10,000 people visiting his blog, and now by many millions reading the daily paper.   Nor have Thompson any means of telling us that this is a very rare occurrence without us responding ‘They would say that, wouldn’t they?’.

When will they learn?