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…
N/A
Livefyre (discontinued)
Score 7.8 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Livefyre was acquired in 2016 and became part of the Adobe Experience Manager suite of products. The product has since been discontinued, and is no longer available for sale.
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.
I was strictly the implementor of Livefyre (for my company only). That task alone was at least 3 weeks worth of work. From a user standpoint, Livefyre is a good product which is why this review is strictly about how difficult it was to implement. Therefore, if a colleague was to ask me if I recommend Livefyre, it's not a straight answer. Questions like, 'how fast do you need it?', 'how centralized is your user database?', 'do you want social login?', all come into question and were details that made my job not easy (hence, my review of 5/10 for suggesting it to others). Once implemented, Livefyre is a great product (notice my overall review is higher), but based on my experience with implementation, it certainly requires a senior developer's dedicated time and patience to set up exactly as desired. For smaller companies with small/simple user bases and websites, the process may be more straightforward, but from my experience, it wasn't out-of-the-box at all.
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.
It's pretty flexible. There were only a few things we found that were too specific to our environment and could not be easily done.
The out-of-the-box GUI design was decent. It was also configurable with limited custom CSS, anticipating the need for each company to customize the look and feel to suit their own needs.
Basic interface is good, providing the necessary data points like total comment count. Visual effects are good too, with fade-in effects for new comments.
They also provide back-end APIs to gather information about the "hottest" threads. We used this to construct our own "Hot Topics" section that could link users to the related article so they could comment themselves.
Good support, even after implementation. They were always available by phone and even through realtime IM chats direct to their developers, skipping awkward non-technical middlemen.
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.
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.
We are planning to continue using Livefyre comments on several of our blog properties due to its simplicity, transparency and speed of operation. We are actively researching it's more advanced features for some other platforms that need higher end results. Keep up the good work Livefyre.
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.
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.
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.
