Tuesday, 1 May 2007

Feefo.com

Noticed this on Charles Tywhitt's website the other day: "independent user feedback from Feefo.com".

Feefo is doing very much what I described in this post. Gathering customer feedback on behalf of a supplier, aggregating it, and then providing reports/tools for the supplier to use on their own website. They are currently focussed on suppliers of products (like shirts) rather than services (like fixing taps), but the concept is the same.

At the moment, though, they have very few suppliers signed up, and of course getting critical mass of suppliers is as important as getting critical mass of feedback.

I do, though, really like the way that, once you have submitted feedback, they ask you to offer feedback on **any other company you have ever used**. So you could offer an opinion on your local butcher, or on you cable TV company. Feefo then (presumably) find some contact details for that company and tell them "hey, Bruce Greig says your company is great / mediocre / sucks. To get more useful feedback like this, you should consider signing up to Feefo". Great example of word-of-mouth marketing.

I struggle to find enough time to really get my head around what we ourselves want to do here. Certainly something. Question is exactly what, and with whom. We are talking to one other player in this space, who is working hard to provide really good solution to this problem, and we will back them (with time and effort, not money) and see how it pans out. I think.

5 comments:

Eddie said...

Hi Bruce,

I work for Feefo - glad you like the concept.

One of our main aims is to generate feedback about service as well as products. If you go the CT shirts site, you will see feedback for both.

I think Feefo would work well for your site. It's really easy to set up, and the basic service is totally free.

The fact that it's completely independent lends a credibility that is vital for your line of work.

If you want to talk further about it, feel free to contact me on eddie @ feefo. co. uk

Anonymous said...

I'm checking out feefo. I tried the example at examplesupplier and got the feedback form.
So far so good.
But what I want to know is what will actual users see. Will there be ads on the page(s)? Especially will there be keyword ads from competitors of my product line? e.g. from adwords.

bill said...

Nope - we (Feefo) wouldn't let competitors - or anyone else for that matter - advertise on your feedback page. We mainly expect to make our income by selling you reports - they have to be good enough for you to want to pay for them!

Anonymous said...

Hi Bruce,

I've just received an e-mail from Feefo following a purchase with CT, wondered who they were and through googling ended up here (among other sites).

To add a few further thoughts on this approach on gathering customer feeback (and these are my first reactions - once I've had chance to relect, they might be change)

1. The e-mail nearly got ignored as spam - an e-mail from someone called 'Feefo' shows all the hallmarks of a randomly generated name ...

2. Being told what I've purchased from a web site by a 3rd party made me suspicious (I hadn't seen any info on CT re this new feature so it was a surprise)

In summary, specific / targetted feedback could be very useful - to make it work though, the company gathering it will have to work hard to overcome the natural suspicion that builds up through exposure to all the spam and scams on the internet.

2p worth from an end customer ...

Ed said...

If anyone out there, Bruce included, is interested, we now have a few customers and many more lining up to join.

In particular, we are really committed to expanding our small business offering and you don't need a website - we can offer you enough space and contact info space on the page where the feedback sits. Any tradesman or service supplier can send us the email details of their customers along with a description of what they have done and we'll publish the feedback they get. Simple.

All the best

Ed at Feefo