Bazaarvoice Platform Reviews

The format of the connections portal could be updated.

Fewer system outages that cause reviews to not be shown

Better tracking of active and inactive products on retail sites

Implementation is very demanding.

There are no out of the box solutions.

Implementation is not a one person job.

Their login to their portal is awful. They are working on creating a single sign on experience but right now there are different usernames and passwords depending on what dashboard you are attempting to access.

They could probably spend more time optimizing the cost of their initialization script. The size of the JavaScript concerns me.

They could work on their deployment and preview tools. The time for our staged changes to show on the live site doesn't seem to be as quick as it should be and the preview tools don't take into account the site's CSS files for display.

I think more notifications need to be sent out earlier for system outages and broken features.

Don't just tell me when I open an issue case that it is a "Known issue and we are working on it", let me know before I open a case.

Toggleing between brands and staying on the same task could be easier.

The improvements made to the current platform are great however I feel there could be more frequent releases to update certain aspects of the platform that feel a little neglected. For example the process of uploading a photo to the site via curations is quite clunky for a customer and not able to be adjusted to be in line with the rest of the website. It would be great if this was more dynamic.

Some of the reporting features are clunky and confusing, but they just updated that!

I wish Reviews and Q&A information could be exported at the same time and that CGC for both could be displayed in one view.

The fact that email addresses cannot be searched is frustrating.

I feel like the overall design could be updated.

Easier to find specific reviews.

Bazaarvoice's backend analytics and UI is overall clunky and confusing. There is a pretty steep learning curve. It needs to be updated.

The reporting on Bazaarvoice is also clunky. The export tool is confusing and not pretty. It needs to be updated.

Although we've got great technical support, I wish there was more "consulting" happening to help us understand how we can leverage the data we're collecting even more smartly than what we are.

Real-time notifications i.e. desktop notifications.

Streamlined reporting across Bazaar Voice applications is not available and that requires manual efforts to integrate and understand data from diff applications

Flexibility and more options would be great for various layouts that is not available at this time

It does not allow including reviews from other platforms and that is missing

They are working on building their new support community. I think when the community get better the more vendors get involved in it.

Bazaarvoice does suffer from some deficits. Filtering for reviews and questions is virtually worthless if you're trying to zero in on a specific product or group of products. The best you can do is filter by product ID, but different retailers will have different IDs for the same product, so even that is not intuitive or effective.

Speed of the product is slow on the average day, very slow on a bad day, and slightly better than slow on a good day. Loading more questions/reviews or refreshing a view can be time consuming.

Bazaarvoice's reporting is severely lacking. I need to use reports to track my team's responses for quality purposes. I also use this data to gauge productivity. However, report filtering doesn't allow you to filter by response date...only the date on which the review was posted by the customer. Although the spreadsheet you get DOES include the response date, this is inexplicably missing from report filters.

Thinking back on speed, reports take a VERY long time to pull, even when your date range is small and recent.

If you have multiple users who respond to items, there's also no user differentiation in reports. So unless you have your team members sign/initial their responses, there's no way to tell who wrote what when you look at a response report. This seems like an oversight since every user has their own unique login credentials.

Finally, you should consider what your retailer network will REALLY look like. My company has around 15 retailers activated on our network, but more than 90% of our reviews come from just two of those dealers. Responding to questions is free with BV, but reviews require an upgrade to Connections Premium, so it's a good idea to check all your retailers' sites to see how many reviews they house and how active users are before paying for the upgrade.

Hard to keep up

Examples of responses not available

Limited mobile capabilities

Lack of Global: The tool does not expand to a lot of retailers outside the US. I know they are building this out more all of the time, but can be a bit frustrating.

Expensive to Customize: The out-of-the-box solution is great, but if you decide to customize more heavily, it can lead to high costs. Bazaarvoice requires teams hand over creative files and they develop it on their end, which is not always ideal.

Tough to Input your own Reviews: Bazaarvoice has policies about what meets "their criteria" for review generation. If you collect reviews outside of Bazaarvoice and want to upload (eg. an event), if it did not go through their platform you usually can not submit.

I would like to be able to incentivize our customers to leave a review by offering a coupon or entering their name into a drawing if they leave a review. However, Bazaarvoice doesn't consider these authentic reviews if our customers are rewarded for leaving them and so they discourage this practice. However I've seen other review engines offer a way to reward customers for their reviews.

We have a Magento store with two different store instances. When we brought the second store online and added Bazaarvoice it was a disaster. Our products were all mixed it up and it took several months to resolve. I would be very careful if you're running more than one store with Bazaarvoice.

I wish they had a more robust reporting dashboard. Most of the reports have to be generated using a template that is emailed to me and downloaded as a csv. I would rather see this info in the dashboard with the ability to download charts and report info in a pdf. This is helpful in reporting to the executive team who likes a visual [presentation].

Recently there were some changes to some of Facebook's policies. This has made pulling content from Instagram and Facebook a little more difficult than it was in the past. We now cannot send automated permission requests to customers as easily as we could before.

It can get a little confusing when you are managing many different content channels with different rule sets. Initially we had a very complicated set up and found the dashboard a little confusing to navigate, but we have since trimmed down the complexity and have had no problems.

Occasionally it can take much longer than expected to hear back from the support team.

When we introduced Bazaarvoice and replaced our core platform product review function we saw the number of reviews reduce quite drastically. This is because our old review form was very short and simple to use, whereas in our Bazaarvoice implementation we introduced a lot of extra questions and ratings for the reviewer to complete. This caused some users to abandon the process. We have learnt there is a fine line between asking more questions to get richer content for those in the buying process and asking too many questions so that reviewers are put off. To that end, the Bazaarvoice product would benefit from inbuilt A|B testing to help clients optimise the implementation.

More flexibility to customise the product review invitation email when using the Conversations product, and the ability to choose which system emails are turned on and which are turned off. Currently it's all or nothing, with the exception of the review invitation email, so we have opted to turn system emails off rather than have our customers bombarded with emails about their product review.

I have only had to contact Bazaarvoice support a couple times, I feel the experience could have gone better. It could have been a one off or my lack of communicating the issue I was having. I disconnected that call, tried again and the next agent was extremely helpful so I quickly forgave.

We lacked true integration assistance. We found so many things that were off or overlooked, things that a vendor should be on top of when setting up someone transitioning.

The tool, when implemented, seems pretty bloated in terms of how it is built and total assets used.

We had to take ownership of the integration process and do additional resource to then reach out to our team at the vendor to gain help with.

Would be good to have more control over the UI within the dashboard. The control is there, but more flexibility over specific layout in the front end of the website would help.

Account management is below par....really only get service at renewal time

They don't see us as a partner and don't really express interest in growing our business unless they was to sell us more products.

They are really just a necessary evil

Innovation - especially in data and flexibility. Although top of the list for me in reporting/analytics, this will not always be the case.

Flexibility - some of the newer product improvements are more structured.

Internationalisation - although coverage is strong in many areas, Bazaarvoice could do with stronger adaptability to the different international markets.

Bringing Curation into the singular Bazaarvoice dashboard instead of a separate link will be beneficial. Right now there are two separate links. Currently you use two different dashboards to access each feature.

I would also like the Training and Issues portal (Spark) to be part of the Bazaarvoice dashboard and not a separate link/email/password.