The Bazaarvoice platform provides businesses
with the ability to collect and publish authentic feedback from their
customers, who can review products and services, ask questions, and post photos
and videos of their experiences with products. The vendor says that leveraging
user-generated content can increase sales and build brand loyalty. Within the platform, the vendor provides seven core modules: Ratings & Reviews Questions & Answers Sampling…
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Wildfire Interactive (Discontinued)
Score 10.0 out of 10
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Wildfire was a social media advertising management software application that was acquired but since discontinued by Google.
Bazaarvoice is overall a quite strong ratings and reviews platform. If you have a national brand and want to integrate ratings and reviews into your website, Bazaarvoice should be in your consideration set. If you have a small business or a tighter budget, you may find Bazaarvoice too robust or expensive of a platform. If your brand gets a lot of organic product reviews, Bazaarvoice will be a helpful tool to increase brand credibility and search engine rankings. If you need help getting consumers to review your products, Bazaarvoice offers sampling programs. These programs can get very pricy depending on how many SKUs you are looking for reviews on. Bazaarvoice also has a proprietary platform where they collect consumer reviews for many brands, and once you have the Bazaarvoice ratings and reviews platform, you may be able to purchase reviews of your products and have them sync to your website without having to run a sampling program.
When a customer purchases from us, they are sent a post-interaction email by Bazaarvoice two weeks later after they've received their purchase and had a chance to try it out. This email gets customers back on our site leaving SEO-rich reviews. Our marketing team uses these reviews for social posts and email blasts as well.
The Bazaarvoice annual conference was really beneficial. I was able to talk to different Bazaarvoice teams and get recommendations for improving our experience with Bazaarvoice. I also got ideas from fellow marketers on how they were able to increase reviews or use the reviews in marketing initiatives.
The Bazaarvoice Conversion Impact Report lets me know Conversion Rate, AOV, Revenue, etc. for customers who've used reviews vs. those who haven't. This helps me know that Bazaarvoice is paying for itself.
The Questions & Answers section on the product detail pages give us another way to add SEO-rich content when we answer customer questions. It also gives us insight into what the customers are struggling with. With this info we will add info to our product description, shipping pages, etc.
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.
The entire product is quite dated - in our two years with the product, only the visuals have been updated. While other products have added things like multi-platform entries, Wildfire is essentially the same as it has been since our first experience with it.
In its self-service mode, the product lacks some essential features like mandatory likes and white label.
Embedding a whitelabel contest is a major undertaking, and requires quite a bit of work within the Facebook developer panel.
We are happy with the product and really just need to optimise our deployment of it on an ongoing basis. There is a lot of functionality prebuilt within Bazaarvoice which we want to have on our site, and to recreate this in our platform would take significant effort which is not practical for us.
Our initial contract with Wildfire Whitelabel was for $30,000/year, as we progressed we found several alternatives for significantly less. We used this to our advantage to lower the second year to $17,000 with the limitation in the level of support (they call this their "core" subscription). Support has been quite bad.
During our contract, we also asked for quotes on some custom work, but never managed to get an answer (or actual quote). Now two years into our contract, the limitations and lack of development are enough for us to find a different solution. Newcomers to the market like Rafflecopter, WooBox and PunchTab are delivering much better results for a fraction of the price
I'm sure all processes and program can improve, however Bazaarvoice has reached a very easy usability level and hope this continues as the product improves over time.
The Bazaarvoice team is always available via call, email, or any other platform to provide help, guidance, or to push or ask for the task we set earlier. They are talkative and easy to share information and discuss issues if there are any. Thay may have more out of box solutions for easy implementation, but as a whole, and regarding support I am satisfied.
Gave me a thorough rundown on everything the software does. Sometimes it is difficult to run through it all over the phone/internet, but I was able to figure it out myself.
Both services are a good choice. I don't feel you can go wrong with either option. They would have both fulfilled our need and have very similar offerings. We ended up going with Bazaarvoice Conversations because of their initial cost for setup. The cost at the time for annual fees were similar.
Wildfire was a merely an adequate social media tool when it existed as a standalone, but it just couldn't compete against other players like Sprout, Falcon, and Sprinklr.
This has had a positive impact on the way the company identifies user issues and complaints more easily/readily.
The negative impact is that departments seem to put a lot more expectations on our customers than this tool can provide (e.g., replies and follow-up), meaning that we aren't as able to provide additional information when requested.
It's uncertain whether responding to reviews adds a lot of value when all is said and done. Reviewers rarely adjust their ratings, even if/when we sufficiently address their concerns or resolve issues.
Our TOS and engagement with our fans increased when implementing this.
Social metrics Wildfire provided for the different brands allowed sales opportunity to increase social worth and ultimately increase cost on advertising initiatives.
