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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Oktopost
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Oktopost empowers B2B enterprise and mid-market companies across Tech, Financial Services, Healthcare and other sectors to adopt a data-driven approach to social media marketing. Oktopost's social media management, social listening, and employee advocacy solutions enable B2B organizations to amplify their brand on social and measure the real impact of social on the business. Oktopost aims to enable marketers to better engage with customers and prospects, get actionable insights, and…
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.
The product is very easy to use. And the features are very good. I have not experienced anything less appropriate. It works as I expect and empowers me to be a better promoter of my company's social media which is directly tied to our company goals. It functions as expected and I would not change the user interface.
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.
Make Google (G+) allow personal submitals through Oktopost. Let me make this clear, this is NOT an Oktopost problem, this is a Google problem!! But I put this down here because it is the only missing link to creating a total social media tool kit.
When I first started there were very few support documents and learning resources. I think I was one of the first to sign up. Since then they have clearly been working on filling the learning center with information. Keep up the good work!
The emails that start off with "My name is Mark Lerner, Director of Marketing at Oktopost.... ;-) Mike 50 emails later I know who you are. Introduce the wife and kids next please ;-)
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.
I don't think there is a need to change over to another platform. From the little that I've heard, Oktopost is comparable if not better than its competing products. We also have a great personal relationship with Oktopost's founders and team and enjoy collaborating in various forms with them.
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.
Because in general is very good, the support team is always happy to help and you can ask them anything. They always have the solution. I also like the new functionalities that they are implementing; each month, we have something new. The end user platform is very easy to be used by the sales people.
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.
When I have sent in questions to support, I have received answers pretty quickly and they were helpful. However, I would like to see more information on the support page rather than having to contact them directly.
As I stated earlier, I would suggest doing a quick session with the Oktopost team in order to properly set up the account and make sure you are getting the full experience.
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.
We use similar programs to Oktopost in our organization like Hootsuite, so we didn't really compare Oktopost against them, we just use them for different things based on familiarity and processes. There aren't any specific products that we looked to replace or compete, it was mainly looking for something that fit our needs at the time and Oktopost worked well, but we still do have people using Hootsuite as well who perform different tasks. They both have unique features and benefits that work well.
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.
Ability to quickly and comprehensively provide metrics on all activities to internal users and external clients helps inform and direct immediate and long term posting decisions.
Ability to integrate with websites and marketing platforms allows for an understanding of user interest beyond the awareness arena and into the conversion arena.
Ability to quickly post allows for immediate input during time sensitive social discussions.
