We have been working closely with a client to develop a reactive response protocol for identifying reviews from dissatisfied customers, addressing their concerns, and delivering service corrections. After four months of active listening, we found the majority of negative reviews occur on two consumer complaint sites; of 118 issues identified, 54% appeared on PissedConsumer.com, and 16% appeared on ConsumerAffairs.com.

There are three basic types of consumer review sites:

1. Consumer Reviews and Ratings – These sites are distinctive in that they require contributors to rate the business, often on a scale of poor to excellent, or 1 to 5 stars, as part of their written review. Built around the idea of customers helping customers, the rating gives a quick read of the company, while the written reviews detail strengths and weaknesses, and dole out advice. Consumer rating sites often allow users to rate the helpfulness of the reviews they find on the site, thus shepherding the overall trustworthiness of the content. Examples: Yelp or Rate It All
2. Consumer Awareness – These sites were developed to provide objective third party reviews of product or service strengths and weaknesses, as well as provide general consumer education. Many of these sites have grown out of long-standing, well-reputed publications that have been trusted by consumers and journalists alike. Example: Consumer Reports and Edmunds.
3. Consumer Complaint Sites – Unlike their digital cousins, complaint sites have only two purposes, to provide consumers with grievances a soapbox on which to vent, and to profit from those grievances.

Businesses battling the parasitic effect of consumer complaint sites find themselves up against a daunting challenge. For starters, their names can instill a sense of paranoia in a consumer before they even read a review, for certainly nothing on pissedconsumer.com can be good. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to most visitors, consumer complaint sites are for-profit entities. They generate revenue primarily through advertising with Google AdWords and other ad networks, they sell business reputation management services, which I’ll touch on again later, and Pissed Consumer even goes so far as to charge users to feature their complaints. Called preferred positioning, the site promises greater visibility by other consumers and better chance of being contacted by the company for resolution in exchange for “a small fee”. I find it hard to imagine any consumer would pay for this so-called service; although I suspect a competitor might see it as a viable defamation tactic.

While I am no fan of these profit tactics, my greatest concern with consumer complaint sites is that in this age of customer-to-business dialogue facilitated by social media, consumeraffairs.com and pissedconsumer.com effectively amputate opportunities for true dialogue.

ConsumerAffairs.com does not provide a response mechanism for companies that want to reach out to, and solve the problems of, dissatisfied customers. Nor do they provide the ability to comment on individual postings. They have one form: a complaint form. Businesses who wish to respond to user reviews are instructed to use the complaint form. All complaints are screened by moderators before publishing, and my experience has been that company responses do not get published.

Pissed Consumer allows commenting, which provides businesses with the opportunity to respond within the thread to both the complaint’s original author and others who have commented on that thread. Unfortunately, comments are not tied back to user accounts, even when a user is logged in at the time of submission. This prevents readers from viewing other activity by the author. Notification of follow-up activity is also wanting. Both businesses and users are forced to manually search for responses to their posts.

ConsumerAffairs.com and Pissed Consumer do promote reputation management as premium services, enabling businesses to respond directly to consumers, but they are secretive about the features and benefits of these premium services. To find out more, I had to fill out a contact form and wait to be contacted by a sales representative. When Pissed Consumer called, I quickly discovered that they would not talk to me because they “don’t do business with agencies”. Pissed Consumer will deal only with the actual company that complaints are against and require a signed non-disclosure agreement before discussing any of their premium services. I advocate that companies manage social and customer service internally for greater authenticity, but agencies help clients by vetting service prior to recommending them. If you won’t talk to me, I cannot, in good conscious, recommend your services to our clients.

I’ll admit it, I felt affronted by this exchange with Pissed Consumer, but I hope that you are too. As businesses adopt social media to deliver customer service, consumers will begin looking carefully at how companies are responding to negative reviews. I firmly believe that sites that don’t provide a response mechanism do a disservice to customers who are looking to answer the question “if I have a problem, will the company help me resolve it?”

I use the internet a lot. I’m browsing daily, reading articles & blogs, shopping, socializing, researching, paying bills, etc. etc. So, I come across usability issues pretty often. I’m even more prone to noticing these annoyances because it’s my job, which makes it that much more painful. However, I make it a point to learn from these instances. I see an issue and I immediately commit it to the “Don’t ever do that” portion of my memory. So, I’ve decided to start sharing. What’s the point in keeping it all to myself, right? I figure this could be a way to get these usability faux pas out in the open so that history will stop repeating itself. At the very least it’ll make me feel better and we all may learn something along the way. So, here I go….

A story about abandoned towels.

I’ve been thinking of getting new towels for a while now, but the frugal side of me has me waiting for a good deal. So, the other day, as I was browsing my money saving blogs, I noticed a post regarding a great deal on Ralph Lauren towels at Horchow.com. For those of you that don’t know, Horchow is a mail order only division of Neiman Marcus (with the exception of their Horchow Finale Stores—only 3 to be found).

Now, I don’t recall the exact sale price of the towels, but I know it had to be cheap to grab my attention. They were probably $6-7 a towel, and being Ralph Lauren, I knew (or assumed) that they’d be good quality. My mind was made up. I was getting new towels and I was super excited.

So, I went to their site to get my new towels. Everything was smooth sailing at first. I was able to efficiently navigate their “Pottery Barnesque” site to find the towels section and locate the product I was looking for. No problems there. There they were. My inexpensive Ralph Lauren towels.

With all good deals there must be sacrifices.

Now, you have to understand that when you’re shopping frugally, especially on a deal as good as this one, you may need to make sacrifices. In this case the sacrifice would be on the color. I knew I couldn’t be picky, but I wasn’t going to pay any money for something that wasn’t going to match my home. However, white, tan, brown, cream or even a nice shade of green would have been fine.

Here’s a “representative screenshot” of the Ralph Lauren towel product page. The actual page no longer exists because they have sold out, but I assure you this page will do.

It looks like any normal product page. Nice, big product photo, product name, description, price per product type, etc. There are things I would improve about this page, but overall it’s fine. However, the main issue with this page is the product color representation. There is none. The only list of available colors is located within the drop-down menu next to each product type (i.e. Bath towel, hand towel, wash cloth). In some cases, such as offering a product that only comes in red, green & blue, this works fine. However, when you have colors like papyrus, khaki, and crystal, it get’s a little more difficult for users to find what they’re looking for by process of elimination. They shouldn’t have to work that hard anyway.

Roadblock: which color is Larkspur?!

So, this was my problem. The listed color names were too vague and confusing. They were, white, bay leaf green, khaki, papyrus, meadow, primrose, crystal, sachet, petal, coral, larkspur and chili pepper. To add to the complexity, only 2 of the colors were still in stock and I had no idea which one belonged to which color in the photo. All I knew is that there was one color (a bright blue color) that I definitely did not want to get, even at this price. So, I was stuck. I tried to find answers via their online chat, but after about 20 minutes of my time, they were unable to help me.

In the end, I ended up leaving the site without purchasing anything. I abandoned my towels. That one blue color was too bright for me to take the risk and I wasn’t confident enough to make my purchase. I was pretty upset. I really wanted those towels. They would have looked great hanging in my guest bathroom. Just not in that color.

So, what could have made my shopping experience more successful?

It’s easy. One simple addition to the product detail page. All I needed were some text labels on the product photo to represent which color was which. It may not be the prettiest of all product photos, but it would have gained them a sale. Even in the less complex example above, labels would have been nice. The color options for that product are: truffle, fern, celeste and blush. Again, I eventually figured it out after thinking it through, but I don’t want to think. I want to buy. And I’m in the emotional state to buy. In my mind, I already owned those towels. I’m the best type of customer and, as a retailer, you need to take advantage of that. Don’t distract me with silly things such as thinking or guessing.

To take it a step further, they may even want to think about changing the color names to be more user friendly. Such as, brown, green, blue and pink. That may not be so simple for all products, but in this instance it would make things easier.

How many people are “walking away”?

Now, I’m sure they’re not crying about losing my $28 or so dollars, especially since they apparently sold all of the towels anyway, but I can guarantee you that there’s an even smaller possibility that I would have paid full price to play their guessing game.

So, we have to ask, how many sales are they losing because of this issue? How many people just give up like I did and “walk away”? I can guarantee it’s a lot. If a web saavy customer like myself gives up, then it’s easy to presume that there are others. So, make sure to keep the customer in mind when designing and refining your website. Make things easy and quick and intuitive. If you keep those few things in mind then you’ll be a step ahead of your competition, these instances will be avoided and you’re sales wont be impeded. Guaranteed.

Small Update.

After browsing through a few more of their towel selections, I did find another group of Ralph Lauren towels with a color chart. It’s a nice added feature but way too far down on the page. I have my resolution set to 1440×900 and I still missed it. The most common resolution these days is 1024×768, which means those users will have to scroll even further down than I did in order to find it. So, keep the important information above the fold. Don’t force your users to search for what they need because they may not do that. If I had seen this on my original visit then I would probably be the proud owner of some new towels, but it wasn’t on the product page I was viewing. However, it would have been nice if their customer service could have pointed me here.

Your turn.

Sachet. Primrose. Larkspur. What colors do you think of when you read those? A Terralever color expert will be reviewing your answers later this week.

(Not really. We don’t have one of those.)

Since business fan pages have gone on the rise in the last year or so, there have been some great campaigns focused on gaining fans for those businesses. I’m sure you’ve noticed that there has been a large amount of businesses offering FREE goods to consumers in exchange for their fan-ship. I mean, who wouldn’t simply click a button and become a fan for a free bag of Oreo cookies? I did. I still don’t have my cookies, but all I had to do was become a fan. So, the time and energy investment for me was low while the outcome could possibly, maybe, fingers-crossed, be high for me and my family. No loss there. But what happens when these campaigns go bad and the experience leaves a bad taste in consumer’s mouths? Social media backlash. Companies typically want to avoid social media backlash of any kind. It’s quick and painful and it’ll hit you in the face before you know what’s coming. So, to avoid this, a social media campaign needs to be thoroughly planned out. If a campaign is poorly planned and managed, it can create a horrible experience for all those involved.

Let’s use this mornings Incredible Edible Egg (IEE) disaster as an example. Being the frugal consumer that I am, I heard through my online money saving network that starting at 10am EST, IEE was offering a free BOGO (Buy One Get One Free) coupon to the first 30,000 people to become fans. Simple, right? Click a button. Fill out a short form (which was pretty much filled out for you). Click submit. Coupon is emailed to you shortly thereafter. FREE eggs. So exciting!

Now, I have to tell you that as an experienced “become a fan” promo goer I am typically not optimistic about these sort of things. 30,000 coupons sounds like a lot, but when you’re dealing with a pot of over 350 million active Facebook users only 0.08% of them are going to get the coupon. I can pretty much guarantee you that if it was promoted well, there were probably over 30,000 people patiently waiting at their computers for the clock to reach “go time.” Everyone loves free stuff. Especially in this economy. So, chances were that I was not going to get a coupon, but I gave it a shot anyway. I figured I would have my answer in a few seconds and be able to get on with my day either way, right? Maybe not.

Here was my IEE BOGO coupon experience and an example of how things can quickly go terribly, terribly wrong.

At about 8:10am MST I clicked on the link, went to IEE’s Facebook page and became a fan. However, instead of being taken to the coupon sign-up page, I get this:

Now, because I work in, on and around the Internet all day long, it was clear to me that IEE hadn’t planned for all 30,000 (or more) users hitting their server at once. But to the average everyday Facebook user the experience is perceived much differently: The Incredible Edible Egg is broken. They hate me. They ran out of eggs. They scammed me. It’s a fake promotion. Really, they’ll come up with anything and they’ll tell people about it. This is why it’s best to avoid these perceptions completely.

So, I headed over to their fan page to check out the status of things. Their wall was already filled with comments from angry coupon-less deal goers that were being turned away by their server issues. Within 10 minutes they had hundreds of wall posts related to the promotion. Most angry, some calm and a few funny ones that included the expected egg related pun like, “Well, this didn’t go as EGGspected” or “Looks like the yolks on us.” Har har.

What’s amazing is that, even though they were angry, some fans were still trying to get their coupon 3 hours later and posting about how much of their day they’d wasted trying to get this coupon. They must really love eggs.

In attempt to keep diffusing the situation, IEE had been posting updates every now and again asking people to be patient, but at this point the damage had already been done. The experience IEE provided had not fulfilled fan’s visions of 12 free eggs all nestled away in their fridge for future enjoyment. And trust me, there’s no easier place to express your anger than a forum where you can post your feelings and run away with no consequences. Especially when you get a mob of people doing it at the same time. And it all stems from the fact that users feel entitled to receive what you said you were going to give them and it’s completely unforgivable if they don’t get it. Especially if it’s free.

So, when moving forward with a simple social media campaign like this, make sure you plan out every minor detail. Make sure that the user’s experience is fast, simple and easy. Let them get in and out without any hassle so that they are compelled to leave a positive message on your fan page and possibly even pass along your promotion to their friends through their many social media avenues. You want and need them to pass it on to make your campaign more successful. And ensure that you plan for worst case scenarios so that your promotion doesn’t die within the first two minutes of its launch.

I’m sure that IEE will recover from this incident. They’ll get the system working again and will probably have to give all of their fans coupons, well beyond the 30,000 they originally intended. Once they do that, everyone will be happy again and IEE will be able to live a more enjoyable existence. But, with better planning and guidance IEE could have saved themselves the heartache by doing it correctly from the start and keeping everyone happy all along.

Here are some of my favorite posts:

User Experience, also commonly known as UX, is a term not to be taken lightly when it comes to online marketing. It is also a term that I believe is highly misunderstood and often confused with terms such as Usability and User Interface Design.

So, what is User Experience?

Simply put, User Experience is a term used to describe the overall experience and satisfaction a user has when using a product or system. In Terralever’s case, that would be a website or web application but it also applies to a consumers experience using, let’s say, an iPhone, car, dishwasher, airport elevator, gas pump, mail box, office chair, etc…

It’s easy to see why User Experience is often confused with Usability and User Interface Design, after-all, they are both very important elements of the User Experience as a whole – It’s the synergy of many elements that makes up User Experience. This includes Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Human Computer Interaction and Human Factors Engineering, just to name a few.

In online marketing, the perfect User Experience can result in conversions, leads, sales and ultimately success – The question is, have you planned ahead for your customers’ User Experience?

For a more in depth view of User Experience Design check out: www.montparnas.com/articles/what-is-user-experience-design/