By Rafaela Ruf - Head of product at GUURU and UGC expert
Transforming live customer conversations into powerful UGC
This blog on UGC was originally written on December 6, 2023, and updated on August 7, 2024.
User-Generated Content (UGC) is non-negotiable in online retail simply because customer opinions play such a crucial role in customers’ purchasing decisions. A whopping 95% of consumers read consumer reviews before making purchases (Newswire) – myself included. However, obtaining high-quality UGC, especially recent customer opinions, can be challenging.
In this post, I’ll guide you through the importance of UGC, highlight some tough challenges many of our eCommerce clients face, and share a powerful strategy to consistently obtain recent, relevant, and high-quality UGC without a huge effort.
Let’s start with a few statistics.
Statistics about the importance of UGC in eCommerce:
- If brands used user-generated content, 84% of people would trust them more (Entribe).
- 90% of customers consider authenticity a key factor in choosing the brands they support (Stackla via Forbes).
- 87% of businesses use user-generated content to build trust with their customers while saving money (Searchlogistics).
2 Big challenges with Customer Reviews in eCommerce
Yes, it’s crucial to bring authentic customer opinions to your online store, but what I often hear from the brands I work with is that it’s much harder than it seems. While customer reviews are the go-to in eCommerce, there are some big challenges that often stop brands from finding and using UGC effectively in eCommerce, which means they won’t truly see its power at play in their sales numbers.
Very few shoppers write customer reviews
In comparison to the number of shoppers that read reviews, a small number of shoppers actually write reviews. That pushes companies to motivate customers to leave digital feedback on their products. However, increasingly countries, including Germany, are enforcing legal steps to deter companies from asking for or incentivizing customer reviews.
Customer reviews have a credibility problem
81% of consumers are concerned about fake reviews. Which is why we see great efforts in eCommerce to make the content source transparent by, for example, verifying that the author is a real product user or can be trusted. Anonymous users simply aren’t trustworthy anymore.
How customer conversations inspired an alternative to Customer Reviews
I’m continually impressed by the quality of content exchanged in our Community Advice live chat. Our chat connects passionate customers with advice-seeking shoppers in real-time, directly on online stores.
If you want see an example of one of these customer conversations, take a look at the blog that my colleague, Chris Apostel, wrote: Brand Advocates: The Secret to Driving Sales with Authentic Conversations. Chris’s blog includes screenshots of one of these community conversations.
Customer conversations typically include experience-based opinions, product usage tips and recommendations – and they’re so personal and relatable. A sincere conversation, with experienced-based advice from a customer you trust, has an incredible conversation power. Before I get into the UGC alternative we developed, here are shopper feedback examples following community conversations:
Bringing authentic UGC to every website visitor.
It’s authentic customer exchanges like these between shoppers and Guurus that inspired our Community Content.
What is a Guuru?
A Guuru is a passionate customer qualified to provide advice via our live chat. To become one, invited customers must pass a knowledge test. Guurus offer knowledgeable and passionate advice on the lifestyle our clients’ products support, creating relatable, trusted, and authentic product content that shoppers connect with.
Although it’s exciting to witness how meaningful these discussions are, they’re only accessible to advice-seeking shoppers who use the live Community Advice chat.
Community Content: extracting authentic UGC from customer conversations
My team and I wanted to make the value of this UGC available to every website visitor, beyond 1:1 conversations. That’s why we developed Community Content. Our Customer Review alternative simplifies compelling, relevant UGC for online stores.
What is Community Content?
Community Content complements our Community Advice Solution by seamlessly extracting trusted opinions from live conversations. The service leverages advanced AI to identify content and automatically extract valued product content or advice from live community conversations into relevant product pages.
How do we pull relevant advice from live conversations into Community Content?
Our AI-powered community software scans live conversations and extracts valuable content about your products and displays it as Community Opinions, alongside all relevant details including the respective community member’s profile, on relevant product pages.
What sets Community Content apart from Customer Reviews?
Trust, authenticity and effort.
Trust and authenticity: each piece of Community Content is linked to the Guuru who shared it, accompanied by their detailed user profile. This transparency showcases their passion and experience, fostering trust among shoppers. The ability to initiate 1:1 live conversations with Guurus further boosts your customer’s brand experience. With the increasingly crucial role that trust plays in eCommerce I recently wrote a blog about it, Community Content: The most trusted form of User-Generated Content.
Effort: Relevant content is automatically identified, summarized, and seamlessly integrated onto respective product pages.
Our approach not only facilitates direct, engaging interactions when shoppers actively seek answers but also encourages passive engagement with credible, high-quality User-Generated Content (UGC).
I really believe this low-effort strategy effectively amplifies UGC’s impact on customer purchasing decisions, enabling brands to forge deeper connections with the faces behind their products.
About Rafaela Ruf
With 15 years of experience in product management, Rafaela loves being the connecting piece between what users want and what technology can build. Joining GUURU in 2020, Rafaela enjoys lean experimenting and the hands-on work at a startup. She is also a passionate dancer and member of Lisbon’s Forró dance community. Follow Rafaela on LinkedIn.
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