That makes it quite of a top, isn’t it? But let’s see why…
During the past decade, the number of tools that help brands manage their almost real-time intreactions with their social media subscribers or simply random visitors or better say commentators has been growing. Monitoring brand mentions and reactions to posts on various social media platforms has been jacked by PR people in search of new topics to help them push their messages forward.
While this social media space has its own religious fans as well as rejectors due to numerous unfriendly practices on both sides, the platforms and the brands that use them, there is a new media space evolving: the online retailers (also named e-tailers).
Packed with real customers (people who actually have purchased goods there and been verified by the e-tailers themselves), online stores are also roamed around by potential customers. In and out, they research on new products, learn from others’ reviews, discover which products suit them best, which brands keep their promises and eventually make a purchase – from your brand or your competitor. Then some of them leave a review, giving back to the community who helped them, sharing their experience and potentially, return next time.
Reviews are powerful even when we know the brand. How often customers say that they’ve been loyal to a brand that now disappoints them as they gave up on quality…”these sweaters are not so soft as they used to be….”, “…these diapers don’t absorb as they used to…”, “….love the quality but it’s always been a luck to guess the right size with every model, they never follow the size chart.” And so forth.
Can brands join this type of conversation about what they do for a living, what products they place out in the market and have a public voice by replying to their customer reviews in the stores? And where exactly?
Well, their possibilities might be poor. And not because of them. Unfortunately, although their contribution would help tremendously – customers, potential customers, e-tailers that re-sell other brands’ products and themselves too, they have limited possibilities of interaction with end-customers across the major US e-tailers. Whether they are direct sellers on these platforms or e-tailers sell their products, it is their brand that ultimately gets impacted and has to manage end-customer insatisfactions and community inherited misunderstandings during customer’s purchase journey. And here there are – four parties that could get benefits out of their interactions.
However, most e-tailers are not welcoming this practice.
Beside Amazon, that is leading the online commerce sales in the US and which allows brands to reply to customer reviews, there is only one additional e-tailer, part of the top 9 according to eMarketer, that offers this facility to brands whose products are being sold on its platform: Best Buy, the 5th in the ranks as of this month, if we exclude Apple for obvious reasons.
The rest of them either do not want to offer this service or their platform has certain feature constraints.
While things do not seem to be changing too soon, brands don’t stop showing their surprise when they understand that they have to be muted whenever their customers show their insatisfaction in this public space.
Replying to reviews brings a series of benefits for everyone involved:
1) for customers – who might have missed out on some important product details which, if they had seen on the time of purchase, they would have changed their purchase decision to something that was way better for them. Here, a reply from the brand would clarify the issue for the customer as well as the entire public audience.
2) for potential customers – who would gain more trust in the active, responsive brands that step in to offer solutions to unsatisfied customers instead of being completely idle.
3) for retailers – who do not have the qualified personnel knowledgeable about the products they sell so that their interactions with customers go beyond the typical “you can anytime return your product if you’re unhappy with your purchase”. After all, how would we as customers want the interactions to happen if we were in a brick&mortar store? I think we would appreciate more valuable responses.
4) for brands themselves – who need to meet their promises towards their customers and who are anyway seeking to connect with them on every other channel – why not connecting right in the store?!
Until new e-tailers join this very modest top, brands continue to feel frustrations when reading negative reviews on these platforms without being able to respond.
Image source: https://landmarkglobal.com/trends-insights/global-e-tailers-optimize-goods-services-local-markets/