Walmart.com recently announced that they’re jumping on the bandwagon to offer customer reviews themselves, both on the product page itself and via email after they’ve gotten the product mailed to them. The Walmart.com CMO said that in the future, Walmart.com could interact with people who posted reviews and use the reviews to decide what Wal-Mart sells.
One word of caution: understand the real value and role of customer reviews and do not overestimate their abilities. I just did a post about our research into customer reviews, and how we found them to be beneficial to customer loyalty, customer satisfaction and future sales. There’s no doubt that customer reviews are a great thing, and I’m a big proponent of any retailer adding reviews to their site. But the reason they’re good is because they will give customers valuable information, not because they will necessarily give retailers valuable information.
Customer reviews are a great tool for customers, but they are not necessarily a valuable metric for companies or a great tool for measuring the quality of a product. So 1% of your customers say they love something. Is it the 1% that own stock in your company? Is it the 1% that spends the most money with you? Is it the 1% who works for the manufacturer of the product in question, trying to artificially inflate reviews for the product?
Also, customer reviews tend to draw out the extremes—those that either really love or hate something. Walmart.com’s own research showed that in a testing phase, most reviews were positive: 4 or 5 stars (out of a possible 5). That’s not surprising: you tend to see a lot of 1’s and a lot of 5’s but very few 3’s.
If you want to measure customer reaction to a product, you need to use a satisfaction-based model and it needs to be random, not opt-in like customer reviews.
Customer reviews are not a product development or a product management tool, they’re a marketing tool. Understand their value to your customers, don’t overestimate their value to you, and they can and should be a great addition to any retail website.
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