Bazaarvoice - best of breed, but it's all in the execution
Updated April 08, 2015
Bazaarvoice - best of breed, but it's all in the execution
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- Conversations
Overall Satisfaction with Bazaarvoice
We use Bazaarvoice ratings and reviews and ask and answer across the product pages on our eCommerce site. It took some effort to by our IT department to get the product integrated with our eCommerce platform, particularly in terms of ensuring our SEO was not compromised, but now it is almost entirely managed by the marketing team. We use the conversations product which allows us to very easily change basic elements of the on-page display through config, but also limits us a little - for example we're not able to customise the layout of product review invitation email as yet.
- Excellent reporting with a good array of pre built dashboards and alerts plus the ability to pull out any piece of data you need at any time.
- Enables us to very easily customise the product review form and tailor it to the type of product being reviewed.
- Pre built rating types and social sharing functions that are available for the product review form work particularly well for apparel eg: 'upload a photo of yourself wearing the garment direct from Facebook' and a sliding bar for 'how you rate this garment on fit'.
- 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.
- We've improved on customer service in that our customers now have a dedicated way to ask questions about a product. Time to revert on these questions has proved to be a challenge though, as customers do tend to expect an instant turnaround.
- Feefo,ISAMS
Our eCommerce platform is ISAMS so we were previously using the inbuilt product review function within that. ISAMS reviews worked but lacked the bells and whistles of Bazaarvoice, and we had to initiate a fair bit of customisation to get simple functions like keyword blacklisting built in. We also considered Feefo but their proposition is more of an independent 3rd party surfacing review content about numerous businesses in one place. We wanted customer communications relating to our reviews to come from us, not from Feefo, so Bazaarvoice was a better fit for us.
Using Bazaarvoice
Bazaarvoice Implementation
- Implemented in-house