Daisy Group tell us how they leverage Trustpilot reviews

Daisy Group, established in 2001, is a leading telecoms and IT provider that offers end-to-end solutions to businesses - from voice to mobile, cloud, data, and even connectivity.

In this interview, we spoke with Vanessa Nevins, Daisy’s Customer Experience Director, to better understand why they felt the need to build trust in the first place, and how they leverage Trustpilot reviews throughout the business.

Trustpilot: Why was trust important to you before coming to Trustpilot?

Vanessa Nevins: As businesses are evermore reliant on technology, any incident, whether big or small, can have a major and often costly disruptive effect, causing customers to lose faith in their service providers.

In recent times, the media has reported on stories including data breaches, poor customer experience, and unreliable IT and telecoms services which has contributed to an overall feeling of mistrust within our industry.

A recent customer survey commissioned by Daisy showed an overwhelming number of small to medium-sized businesses now rely on word of mouth and online forums to help make decisions about technology. Daisy understands the power word of mouth can have and knows that seeking reviews and trusted opinions from peer groups are paramount. That’s why, before making important business decisions, key decision makers will consult colleagues, associates, and advice websites.

Before using Trustpilot, we were proactively collecting reviews from our customers in a number of different ways. Our customers represent the Daisy brand and whatever they have to say is important to us as a business. When it comes down to it, there is no better advocate for your business than your customer.

TP: Daisy Group offers many solutions and services to its customers… How does that affect your marketing?

VN: We want to ensure we are sending the right message about each of our products at every touch point. We would not want to under or overestimate the capability and sometimes, the complexity of some of the products we can supply. With new prospects we would especially want to avoid this as not to start the relationship off on the wrong foot.

It is important to us that our reviews showcase what customers really think and feel about Daisy and its products and services. And again, there is no better ambassador for your brand than someone who is already using your products.

TP: How long have you been using Trustpilot?

VN: We have been using Trustpilot for around 12 months and over the past six months, our progress has really taken off - especially since we started to collect verified reviews from our customers through our CRM system.

In this industry, brand trust is very important. We understand that customer reviews are a fantastic way to showcase the feelings of our existing customers to current and future prospects.

TP: How do you use the Trustpilot platform?

VN: The Trustpilot platform allows us to listen and respond to customer experiences, we can also improve as a business from the insight we extract using the range of features available. We use almost all of the features available to us, from integrations to support our brand marketing and analytics which shows how Trustpilot is helping us to further reach our audience.

The platform gives us a closeness to our customer, we see it as such valuable insight good or bad, so we can learn and continuously improve. The most frequented is the ‘Service Reviews’ tab. We use this to respond to all reviews, and we also tag each review depending on where we choose for it to be displayed on our website.

The platform is really easy to use. It has also been helpful to take part in the available webinars so that we can understand each area of the portal. I also think it is good how new releases and product updates are shared with the Trustpilot community so we are kept in the loop at all times.

It is clear that no matter what we need, our account manager will always try their best to assist, even if it is something that they can’t help with – alternative suggestions are always made. I know I can always reach out at any time if needs be.

TP: Are there multiple departments or teams using Trustpilot?

VN: We have worked with our development team to incorporate unique links into our internal system which will ensure, once published, that customer reviews are marked as a verified order. This enables us to use rich snippets and achieve Google Seller Ratings if we choose to use PPC in the future.

What are review snippets?

Review snippets are the ratings and reviews that display directly on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPS), under the page’s URL. A result of schema markup, rich snippets help validate a company’s reputation and often lead to better search traffic. Below is an example of Daisy Group’s review snippets acquired with Trustpilot reviews.

What about Google Seller Ratings?

Google Seller Ratings is a term to describe the average score your company received from online reviews that is displayed on search results. They can be found directly on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPS), under the page URL - Trustpilot

The sales team has recently started collecting service reviews, and we have also incorporated a link which requests a product review – this may be asked for customers who are re-signing with us and have used the product before. Sales are able to use customer reviews to give us an advantage over our competitors. The score we hold on Trustpilot is a powerful tool.

The customer service teams have been using Trustpilot ever since we signed up. Our customer service is something we really pride ourselves on as a business and I think our current Trustpilot score is evidence of this.

Our service teams are available to our customers 24/7/365, and the agents on the team are always willing to go above and beyond for our customers. When feedback is received for an agent, it is recognised by management, and shared with others in the service teams. This creates a real buzz with those who use Trustpilot and maybe even a little friendly competition. It’s great to see the morale boost through the teams when they receive great feedback.

The Service Improvement team reviews all the feedback left by our customers and responds to each of them, whether it’s positive or negative.

We also like to thank our customers for their valuable input. If dissatisfaction is expressed within the review, then we encourage our customers to contact the Executive Resolutions team; an experienced team who are on hand to deal with any high level complaints and dissatisfaction.

TP: How do you use your reviews on your website and in your marketing?

VN: TrustBoxes are displayed across our website, on our homepage and on some of our main product pages. We tag certain reviews based on product so only product-specific reviews show up on product pages.

We encourage all employees to use the Trustpilot signature in their emails – especially customer-facing employees. We recently sent out an internal communication about this.

We have also built a number of new email templates - each one containing the Trustbox specifically designed for emails. We believe it is important to incorporate Trustpilot as part of our branding, especially as some of our key competitors are not using this platform to their advantage.

TP: How do you share your reviews socially?

VN: Trustpilot’s review image generator is great. And combined with online image editing software “Canva”, we’ve created specific templates for social media. We also have plans to use this for the future on specific web pages and within our emails.

We take pride in the high level of customer service we offer, and use these Canva templates to show off our customer service agents to highlight the great work the online community is doing.

TP: What are the biggest advantages the business has seen from using Trustpilot?

VN: The biggest advantage is being able to use the dashboard to view the traffic being driven to our website through organic Google search, and how much this has increased over just a 12-month period. We can also now see the impressions the TrustBoxes on our website are achieving, and we all know that an impression is the first step to a conversion.

Another advantage of using Trustpilot is to be given the opportunity to try and turn your unhappy customers around. We reach out to every customer that leaves a review and offer them an opportunity to contact us so that we can resolve any issues they might be experiencing. This also leads on to the insight the honest reviews give to you – suggestions to improve things internally are always taken on board.

TP: What are your challenges going forward as a business?

VN: We would like to maximise the business opportunity within certain product areas – like mobile for example. We are working to collect product reviews through Trustpilot which naturally takes time to take off.

Also, in the wake of GDPR, unless a prospect has displayed legitimate interest, we can’t reach them through direct marketing and so our marketing has had to undergo a significant shift to relying heavily on an inbound strategy rather than outbound activities. Trustpilot is a key area of our inbound strategy to help increase traffic to our site through organic search, which should encourage more conversions.

Trustpilot: We’d like to thank you for your time! This was an insightful interview.

To learn more about Daisy Group, head to their website or blog. If you’d like to find out more about Trustpilot reviews, request a demo below.