Today’s interview is with Brant Barton, Co-Founder and Vice President of Business Development at Bazaarvoice. An ATG partner, Bazaarvoice develops outsourced technology, services, analytics and expertise to encourage and harness word of mouth marketing and bring it closer to a company’s brand and customer experience.

There is no denying the value of ratings and reviews in driving better shopping experiences for consumers, and better results for online sellers. (Note to readers: see this post from Brant if you need convincing!) How prevalent is technology like Bazaarvoice’s on shopping sites today? How soon will it be ubiquitous? What was/will be the tipping point for adoption?

When we started Bazaarvoice in 2005, Shop.org and Forrester reported that just 26% of surveyed online retailers offered customer ratings and reviews on their websites, but 96% of these retailers rated the feature an effective method for improving conversion rates.  In that statistic, we saw opportunity.  Today, the technology is ubiquitous.  With leading shopping sites like Walmart.com, Best Buy, Sears, The Home Depot, Dell, and many others, not to mention Amazon.com, all using customer ratings and reviews, the vast majority of online shoppers are interacting with this technology.  Based on this, many brands now regard customer ratings and reviews as a mandate, it’s just a question of how and when they implement the technology, which is where we can help!   

How does the rise of “social shopping” sites like ThisNext, Yahoo! Shoposphere, Stylehive.com and Crowdstorm.com affect individual online sellers? 

As social shopping sites become a more significant driver of website traffic and sales for online sellers, I think they help accelerate the social evolution of these companies in a big way, which is fantastic from our perspective.  For one, social shopping sites at their best are active communities entirely devoted to sharing opinions about brands, products, and services.  Engaging with consumers in that environment is very, very different from acquiring them through an AdWords campaign, for example.  Second, social shopping sites are effectively “placeshifting” the shopping experience.  Your website isn’t the only or even primary interface that devoted social shoppers are going to use to research and buy your products.  Not only does your online marketing strategy need to address the increasing socialization of the online shopping experience, your online merchandising  strategy needs to evolve as well.  And, our multi-channel clients are even integrating reviews into offline media, adding yet another social interface for brands to consider.   

What are some best practices for sellers to consider when implementing social commerce technologies like yours? 

Two of the most important and overlooked best practices that come to mind are (1) tactics for promoting and driving adoption of social commerce technologies like ratings and reviews, and (2) leveraging customer-generated content beyond your website.  

On #1:  Bazaarvoice’s most successful clients are those that take a proactive approach to earning customer participation.  There are a number of effective tactics to do this, including promotions, post-purchase “write a review” emails, and working closely with our Community Managers.  The bottom line is that you need to support your social commerce initiative with a strong participation campaign.  The greater the participation by your customers, the greater the return.  

On #2:  The marketing and merchandising value of customer-generated content, specifically ratings, reviews, questions, and answers, is immeasurable.  As an example, our most successful customers have  deployed “Top Rated Product” campaigns on their websites to promote highly rated products.  These campaigns consistently deliver higher than average conversion rates and order values, multiplying the ROI customers realize from our solutions.  This is just one example of many.   There are so many unique and valuable ways to leverage customer-generated content , from customer segmentation marketing (based on frequency and polarity of ratings and reviews) to feeding customer reviews into advertising media, including print catalogs, store signage, and display ad campaigns.  The key objective here is to think beyond the product page, the place that customer ratings and reviews typically call home.  It’s the Metcalfe’s Law of social commerce – the more (in number) and more varied the uses of your customer-generated content, the greater the return for your business.  

What makes one company’s ratings and reviews technology better than the next?

When selecting a social commerce partner, a seller should consider much more than just the technology.  Functionality is always part of the evaluation, of course, but sellers need to consider the partner’s business model, service offerings, product roadmap, multi-channel strategy, partner ecosystem, leadership, and I’ll stop there because I could keep going!  We believe that social commerce is a truly strategic investment and source of long-term competitive advantage for your business.  The decision is not simply to add ratings and reviews to your website or not, it’s are you ready to become a more customer-centric and customer feedback-driven organization?  

To make this transformation, sellers need a social commerce partner whose industry vision and path to success is well-aligned with their own, whose solution will rapidly evolve with the pace of industry innovation and ever-changing consumer behavior, and whose supporting services, like content moderation, community management, and analytics, are robust enough to both protect the brand (i.e., ensuring that truly inappropriate comments do not post)  and deliver deep insight into what customers are really saying.  

I specifically mention content moderation, community management, and analytics, as these are important decision factors for nearly all of our customers.  We manage an inflow of over ten thousand (and rapidly growing) unique pieces of customer-generated content every day and succeed at meeting the most stringent SLAs and content tagging requirements (i.e., we tag reviews based on the business intelligence they contain, such as having a reference to a competitor or noting a product design flaw or defect) of our customers.  Our Community Managers work closely with each customer to design, launch, and optimize participation campaigns to drive ROI.  And our Workbench, a web-based reporting tool, enables our customers to access detailed executive, brand, category, and product-level reporting on demand.  That’s robust! 

In what areas should we look for innovation from Bazaarvoice in the coming year? 

This year we launched two new social commerce solutions that complement our flagship Ratings & Reviews solution – Ask & Answer and Stories.  Ask & Answer is a user-generated question and answer solution.  Think Yahoo! Answers but for your own website, fully hosted and managed, customizable, and designed to seamlessly integrate with your branding.  Stories is a solution for capturing rich, descriptive customer experiences – the “why” behind an important purchase.  

In the coming year, you can expect us to really focus on making Ask & Answer and Stories as successful in the field as Ratings & Reviews has been.  We’ll do this by signing up new customers, publishing case studies on the measurable impact of both solutions, and working with early adopter clients to leverage Ask & Answer and Stories content beyond their websites and in other online and offline media.  In addition, our solutions are rapidly evolving to serve new industry verticals beyond retail, such as manufacturing, financial services, and travel, as well as new international markets.  

Beyond these three dimensions of innovation – new products, new verticals, and new geographies – we are continually looking for ways to help our clients tap into the powerful “undercurrent” of less explicit customer word of mouth that drives so much of our behavior as consumers.  One example of this is a feature we recently launched called Shout It!, which allows a customer to share a product or even a specific review of a product within their social networks.  Sharing a recent purchase or a review you wrote yourself with all of your friends on Facebook is a very powerful word of mouth recommendation that could influence 1, 5, or 10 or more of those friends to run out and buy the same product because of their trust in you.  The social graph holds enormous potential for word of mouth marketing, so we are very much focused on innovation in that area. 

Aside from ratings and reviews, in your opinion, what is the biggest ‘make it or break it’ feature an online store must have? 

In my opinion, an effective “product finder” feature is mission critical.  Some call this search or navigation, others call it personalization or discovery.  Whatever the label or underlying technology, the feature must facilitate the most relevant product selection possible.  Customer ratings and reviews, and customer-generated content in general, are very complementary to this process.  Whereas product finding features drive a shopper to the decision point – I found the product, do I buy it now, later, or never? –  customer reviews give the shopper the confidence to make that decision without regret. 

Anything you care to add?  

Bazaarvoice is a proud partner of ATG’s and has successfully launched many ATG customers on our social commerce platform, including Cabela’s, The Finish Line, A&E Networks, Coca-Cola, and many others.  We work with over 160 of the Web’s leading brands and are helping these companies bring the customer voice closer to the heart of their business, helping them make smarter and more customer-centric decisions about how to market, sell, and support their products and services.  We’d love to tell your readers more about how we can help them, so please don’t hesitate to contact us!  Visit us at www.bazaarvoice.com and learn more about social commerce and the power of word of mouth marketing at www.bazaarblog.com, our company blog.      

[tags] ATG, ecommerce, e-commerce, Bazaarvoice, ratings and reviews, ratings, reviews, social commerce, web shopping, online shopping, word of mouth marketing [/tags]