Showing Customer Reviews on Your Site

By Gianluca Diegoli

I consider the behavior of certain companies (like Dell, that shows opinions on every PC listed in his site) that have the courage and transparency to show ratings and reviews of their products on their own site – hey, I mean *their* products literally, non those they sell online but that are produced by others, which they can always cancel from the catalogue, in the event they become embarrassing.

This is a defining step (in the sense that once you go there, you cannot go back, unless you want to lose face) and a decisive one at that, as it impacts directly the really weak point every company has: that of product design and quality as perceived by their customers – or, at least, their pro-active group of customers.

Opening a web site up to customer ratings is something that, at least on the Italian web, is totally unheard of/unseen. It is a frightening thing, a taboo: the risk of disagreement is normally considered too high. Nevertheless, anyone who has ever run a business (or even sold cakes at school parties), knows that it is nearly impossible to please everyone and that a dose of dissatisfaction is even healthy and acceptable. A dissatisfied customer does not always enjoy the support of other customers as a given, especially when the critique is not justified or is not supported by valid arguments.

It’s hard to understand why we’d want our site to be in no way “marred" by disagreement. Why we insist on the site keeping that bogus, aseptic air of the doctor’s waiting room, that perfect order typical of the houses occupied by unhappy families, a site decorated only by the company-speak monologue we marketers do not believe in even a little, the moment we become customers.

It boils down to one of two cases: we either truly believe that our customers are so stupid as to decide to make a purchase just after reading only what we write on our site and accepting it without seeking other opinions, in which case we are the ones to be deceived - because in reality they will look for “independent” opinions elsewhere, poor us, or we ourselves don’t believe what we write. In that case we are the hypocrites, who prefer to keep appearances up, while letting people express their doubts elsewhere. This means that they will in ways that are unchecked and often difficult to handle. In so doing, we give up on the potential opportunity we’d have to manage the dissent, and - why not – to receive good ideas for improvement.

I am also convinced that the moment of truth on social media for companies is not the corporate blog. It’s too convenient to publish a post every so often on stuff that is important mostly to us, but often is of little or no consequence to the customer (who is there mostly to learn about our product, and not to find out what we are doing at that moment) and to say that yes, we are 2.0, we have ears, we are listening. We listen only when the conversation is about the things we want to talk about.

One could reply “but I’ve inserted the give us your feedback button, to ‘listen’ to customers better”. Well, take note: today those forms barely do anything, because nobody will really use them and because whoever writes, giving you the gift of their time, wants (1) to be sure that you will really read that feedback, (2) wants to be helpful to others and, (3) wants to be visible in his/her effort.

Only when I see the company web site open to customer opinions (moderated, requiring registration, that’s fine) I will truly believe that Italian companies have taken a major step - culturally speaking, that they have understood that the controlled communications iceberg on which they were born and have been raised will not last forever, nor for much longer. They need to learn to float (and prosper) in the high seas (not necessarily dangerous or deathly, for those who know how to swim well, of course) of the social web.

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Gianluca Diegoli graduated in Economics at Bocconi University, the most famous School of Economics in Italy. He has been Product, Marketing and Communications Manager, mainly online and in the ICT industry, gaining a specific sensibility in social and conversational marketing communications. Since 2003, he's been blogging about macro and micro marketing and communication trends at Mini Marketing with humorous, metaphoric and "no-corporate" language style, around the idea of a new marketing for the people, from the people, with the people. Mini Marketing is now one of the most widely read Italian marketing blogs, and it has been quoted in several Italian business books.

Comments

[Dave MacDonald]

Gianluca,

Good post. It’s interesting to see the cultural differences between the US and Italy you mentioned.

You are absolutely right that once you pull the trigger you can’t go back but I think it is incorrect to assume the position that the site is now completely out of control. I think that a company has the right to review each comment and delete ones that are extremely negative or completely out of line.

The important part of a practice like this is to really think about what the post means. If someone writes on Dell’s site “this hybrid pc was a total piece of shit and I hate this company” it should probably be deleted because it gives almost no context and wouldn’t help anyone make a decision. If instead the comment was “this hybrid pc was terrible because I wanted to edit movies and processor is too slow” the comment should be left. It will help anyone who wants to edit movies choose a faster processor - Ideally you have a Dell employee post a reply suggesting the right processor and maybe even a way for the disgruntled poster to make an exchange for the PC that fits their needs. Ultimately building the communication between corporation and customer.

[dominic]

Excellent post.

I wonder whether Dell could go one step further i.e open a window to non moderated comments and reviews.

There are people out there discussing Dell products everywhere in the social web. From blogs to Facebook group to Q&A's in Linkedin and Yahoo.

The next step for Dell is, to me , to make it easy for consumers to access these non moderated discussions about their products, and in // work their influence to the community leaders.

Any thoughts around this ?

[Clay]

Enjoyed the post. One of our clients is Saranac beer, www.saranac.com, and we convinced them to allow users to comment on all of their pages. So far, it has been extremely well received by both the client and visitors.

Hopefully, more companies will start moving in this first direction and then they can move beyond to the non-moderated discussion areas.

[gianpaolo]

I'm not Dell, of course, but I don't think that makes any difference here. I'm just a small italian winery, but that's exactly what I'm doing at the moment: not only I opened a non moderated comment and review section about our wines in my blog, where I'm encouraging people to write whatever they want about each single wine, but I've also just sent 50 6 packs of free wine samples to people (bloggers, non bloggers, sommeliers, whoever has joined this experiment) asking them to rate and review our wines on our non moderated section of the blog. Whatever they want to say, good or not, will appear on our corporate blog and be visible for every visitor to read. And they are doing it right now.
And this is Italy too.

[Christopher Faron]

Interesting post, I'm totally in agreement. I'm from the UK but now living in Italy and I have found the same resistance from Italian companies regarding open and honest communication with customers. As an online customer I kind of expect to see the odd bad review of a product, it just seems more believable.

[Ari Herzog]

This is very true, Gianluca, and echoes Jacob Morgan's belief that marketing firms need to shift their mindset to succeed online:

http://www.jmorganmarketing.com/social-media-best-practices/

What is the Italian mindset on rating websites, through bookmarking tools such as StumbleUpon, Digg, Sphinn, etc? If individual pages are shared with the world and rated for content, then shouldn't the next step include those reviews highlighted on the site being rated?

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Dave - I had to think about your comment a little bit because I have experienced a derogatory comment on this site only once. In that case I modified the comment telling the audience I was doing that and why. There was no need to be offensive. If I expect to have that freedom on my site, I should allow the same freedom to companies. There is a lot more animosity towards entities as there is (usually) towards people. It's easier to justify to oneself. I agree that the responsibility for communication rests on both sides. You might enjoy Connie's guest post on being tone-deaf, too.

@Dominic - I wonder if there are already tools or sites in place where Dell does just that. I know the team and have interacted with them on several occasions and I can tell you that *they* truly get it. However, you must understand that they are still representing the company. This may mean that Dell itself has policies in place. The difficulty with social media for a corporation is that you wear two hats at all times and adhere to your personal values as well as the interest of the business. I will be talking about this at the MIMA Summit on October 1st in Minneapolis. Stay tuned for the presentation at their site (linked on the sidebar).

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Clay - one step at a time to allow the representatives of the business to experience social media is a good strategy. I find that just talking about these issues does not help much unless one is willing to try. It's true for social media, of course, as it is with everything else in life.

@Gianpaolo - perhaps Gianluca would be willing to follow up with you about your experiment with bloggers and other audiences. I'd definitely be interested in learning what you discovered. Did people write spontaneously? What percentage? Let me know if you'd like to talk about it.

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Christopher - customers weigh reviews according to their beliefs and familiarity with products. I noticed that with Amazon, for example. More than once I and others bought books that had poor reviews because maybe we knew the author, or someone we knew (and trusted) told us it was good, etc.

@Ari - I will let Gianluca respond to the question about rating sites. I do not read enough Italian blogs or visit enough sites to have an informed opinion about it. Thank you for the link to Jacob's post. His thinking is very much in line with mine.

[gianpaolop]

@Valeria Just to explain how it works: I didn't email people asking if they wanted samples, but I wrote on my blog that I wanted to create a tasting panel for my wines. Initially 50 then I increased to 100 people. In order to join the panel, people had to subscribe on a page of my blog that I've prepared. There was only one condition required, to have a blog or website. Even this condition wasn't strict and you could join without a blog if you'd send me an email motivating your decision to join in. The surprise was that the most passionate people were those without a blog and I received fantastic email by people that loved the wines, that didn't have blogs but that were ready to share the tasting with friends and would send email to me with tasting notes to be published on my blog.
The tasting panel has been split in two groups of 50 people, each of which received a random 6 bottles pack with our wines The first group has just started (people have received the wines last monday)and people are publishing their notes on their blogs now. I've asked that the panel ended at the end of this month, so we'll see more on the next days.
We promise that we'll republish all the notes on our blog (linking back to the original post if there is one), as soon as they are available, without altering, editing, censoring anything. The feedback section for each wine is active on our blog and will be there permanently and open to everyone to read and comment at any time about our wines, even outside the tasting panel.
I'll tell you more about it when all the 50 people have finished tasting and writing about the 300 bottles that we have sent in total.
So far so good.

[Gianluca]

@all thanks for useful comments. I do appreciate them.
@ari: unfortunately very few people at the moment, in Italy, use Stumbleupon or Digg, I guess mainly because they are not localized yet.
@giampaolo: yours is a interesting story, keep in contact :)

[RichardatDELL]

Thanks Gianluca for the call out on customer ratings and reviews. I believe you can also find some excellent commentary from our customers on the Dell Community Forums and on our blogs.

@dominic, interesting point about customer conversations around the web and you are quite correct, using search and participation in forums people have access to those on their own.

As for bringing those commentaries into Dell, that raises numerous questions. For example, we know from our own efforts to be in touch with people who blog about us, there is some share of spam blogs, link baiting and RSS aggregators that offer little value. Think you would need to filter that out. Comments are not automatically found and that would leave some valuable content unfound. Also, while the content is "out here" Im not sure how people would feel about a company using it. Those are some considerations that come to mind.

In the meantime, your own search and friends may be the best way to gather that information

[alex]

Great!

[Dominique Hind]

I am a big supporter of what Dell have done over the last three years. They are doing a great job at leaving honest feedback and reviews on their site and using it to their advantage (actually listening to their customers). They have definitely learned from their early mistakes of moderating comments and now let the comments remain untouched. I hold them up as a pioneer of customer engagement and will follow their next three years with the same interest.

I have tried to capture their journey to listening here: http://dominiquehind.wordpress.com/2008/09/27/dells-journey-to-listening-ideastorm/

[RichardatDELL]

Hi Dominique

Thanks for the link and the plans to continue to follow our progression. Your feedback and encouragement is appreciated by all of us....and I know we have been in touch on your site too :-)