The pandemic has seriously undermined brand loyalty as customer expectations increase. But customer experience experts, Feefo, reassure businesses in their latest report that there is a lot that can be done to keep even the most disgruntled customers coming back.

Changes to behaviour

Covid-19 changed the world in the space of a few short weeks, and early lockdown restrictions meant that some businesses were forced online entirely. Feefo states that this increase in online purchasing meant that suddenly consumers were just one click away from all the customer reviews that have ever been made public about the product or service they are interested in. In some cases, businesses weren’t ready for this level of online activity and it’s estimated that about a decade of progress was made as new software was updated, built and installed in the weeks and months of the pandemic’s first wave.

Customer reviews need to be a priority for any business that is operating online according to Feefo’s latest findings. A huge 97% of people claim that they consult previous customer reviews before making a purchase. It seems that positive reviews are essential for attracting new business as well as providing proof that existing customers are happy. The data shows that people with a prior relationship to a product or service pave the way for new customer acquisitions.

The importance of reviews

In the case of online shopping, research suggests that reviews are especially important. If someone is buying something online, there isn’t a charismatic, face-to-face customer service interaction. Plus, in most cases, the desired product can’t be tried out or on before it is purchased. In fact, according to the data, online shoppers are more likely to believe what a stranger writes about a product or service than they are to believe anything that a company has written about itself. It’s not limited to formal reviews either, although these have their place. Feefo found that feedback about a product is increasingly available on all channels and that the format of feedback does not need to be formal to be acknowledged or believed.

That being said, as businesses look towards the future for the next “new thing” or way of doing things, formal review systems should not be disregarded. Research shows that they actually have an enormous impact on customer choice and behaviour. If we take the five-star review system as an example, the data indicates that product and service pages that have a five-star rating are 270% more likely to be chosen than product and service pages with no reviews at all.

Negative reviews need not mean the end…

As business was driven online at the start of lockdown in 2020, Feefo’s data shows that the number of customer reviews surged by 40%. We know that people weren’t buying more – in fact, GDP declined so much in 2020 that it formed the steepest fall since records began in 1948 and, in some Treasury estimates, the greatest drop in over 300 years. Overall, the data shows the fall across the financial year at around 9.8%. Between February and April in 2020, the drop was actually a significant 25%.

The numbers suggest that people weren’t buying more, but they were buying differently. The shift to online behaviour accounts for a lot of this, as formal review software is easily integrated into an online customer journey. But it’s also possible that as the lockdown left millions on furlough or with zero working hours, people had time on their hands time to say more online. Interestingly, customer ratings fell by 18.5% over the same period. So, people were buying more things online, they had more time to write about their experiences and a significant percentage of people’s experiences were bad. Feefo conducted a supplementary survey in which they found that nearly half of all respondents (43%) believed that companies had actually become less effective at dealing with complaints and criticisms.

Feefo advises businesses that this data does not necessarily mean that more negative feedback is to be expected and warns that viewing negative feedback as a “bad thing” can actually be a factor in holding companies back. They propose that negative feedback is part of being an authentic brand. While 44% of consumers go straight to a company’s most recent reviews, behavioural research demonstrates that 28% of people seek out negative reviews first instead – even if the customer is highly motivated to buy a particular product or service. It’s easy enough to understand why recent reviews are felt to be the most relevant; while the product or service purchased might be the same, the context it was bought in and experienced will change over time. Perhaps a competitor releases something better, or people’s habits change. Or a global pandemic hits. Feefo turned to psychologists to explain why people might choose to look at the negative reviews first. Wendy Dignan explains that “no company can get it right all the time,” and goes on to describe that negative reviews show customers how the business they are interested in buying from deals with their issues and the issues of their customers.

Of course, it’s impossible to get things perfectly right 100% of the time, and the data suggests that customers in the digital arena are increasingly wise to “fakeness”. Authenticity, including the acknowledgement of imperfection, is valued far more in an era where you can’t always trust what you see. 72% of people were concerned about fake reviews, which clearly translates from anxiety into behaviour. 32% of people would delay making a purchase if they couldn’t find any negative reviews and a further 22% of people would go on to view any positive reviews with suspicion if they couldn’t find evidence of a negative voice.

Turning a negative into a positive

According to the research, negative reviews provide a great deal of potential for gains to be made in customer retention as well as acquisition. Over two-thirds of people (69%) would go on to make a purchase even if there was a recent poor review, as long as the business acknowledged the problem, apologised and offered a solution. But this goes beyond self-reporting. Based on Feefo’s customer feedback tracking, self-reporting is backed up by behavioural data. 44% of people have stayed loyal to a business and made further purchases if their complaint response was rated as “satisfactory”. 40% of consumers posted positive comments on social media after a complaint was well handled, and 35% of people went on to provide a further positive review if their complaint was dealt with well.

The research indicates that acknowledgement is the key to success here and that the story can be very different if unhappy customers don’t feel listened to. The data here is unforgiving: 44% would never use a business again if they did not see a response to their negative review; 37% of people would warn others not to use it; 24% would use social media to slate the brand; 15% of people would be willing to talk to the press if there was an interest in examples of customer service teams failing their customers as a story.

Feefo reassures businesses, however, that negative feedback need not be a nightmare. To see where all the facts and statistics are cited, click here and download the full report.

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