Maximizing Your Star Power: Strategy for Boosting User Ratings
In online marketplaces, customer ratings and reviews play a critical role in solving for selecting a product/service. In India — Price, Assortment, and Rating of the product/service are three prime criteria for users to make a purchase decision. We at redBus, constantly strive to ensure that user feedback is collected in its truest form. For more than a decade, we have worked towards capturing user feedback about their journey using simple and raw forms, and, passing it on to prospective passengers and bus operators.
While it gives the scope for Bus Operators (BOs) to improve their services, it also lay competitive grounds among them. Ranking for Bus Operators on the Search Result page is a function of the quality of the services rendered by them. Hence, it is important that a maximum number of feedback are collected without adding any friction to travelers' experience while using redBus services.
We have been using all mediums like email, SMS, WhatsApp, etc. to gather feedback from customers but what really changed the game was ‘interactive messages’. In this blog, I’ll highlight key elements that helped us boost customer response rate by 25%+ using WhatsApp’s Interactive messaging feature –
1. Near real-time requests to share feedback
The communication to rate the trip is sent close to when the user has completed the journey. They are sent with just enough delay to ensure Bus Operators do not influence the feedback submitted.
2. Simple and brief communication templates
While WhatsApp has no limitation on character count, not everyone is a fan of long paragraphs. Instead of having one long message, plan short dialogues.
For example — instead of saying
“Dear Sakshi, Thank you for choosing redBus, hope you had a pleasant journey. You traveled with XYZ travels on 23rd March 2023, Thursday. Please share your feedback with us, this will help us serve you better”
<Click here to Rate>
We preferred below template –
Dear Sakshi, hope you had a safe trip with XYZ travels on March 23, Rating your experience will help us serve you better”
CTA < Rate now >
3. Clear ‘Call to Action’
While using WhatsApp’s interactive messages, make sure the call to action should lead to the user taking action at the moment. Just one click is all that is needed to begin the feedback loop.
Ex — Instead of using “Click here to Rate” or “Rating link”; we preferred the “Rate now” option
The “Rate Now” option provides the list of rating options to users along with the scale interpretations.
4. Different funnel basis user sentiment
Use the power of emojis, gifs in this channel. All the versions below read different.
a. Glad to hear that you had a great experience.
b. Yayy! Sooo glad to hear that 😍
c.
5. Making the most of the great experience
In nutshell, using the right channel with the right interactive capabilities has helped us boost ratings to 1.25x levels. With users adapting to this method, we are continuously making improvements to make all communications more personalized, relevant, and in the language preferred by customers. Do share how you hacked the feedback system in your experience.
