Voliamo is a London-based online travel agency with a team of 20 staff members working cross-functionally across different departments which include Strategic Alliances & Partnerships, IT & Development, Marketing & Analytics, Sales, Customer Service, Accounts, MIS & Quality Analysis.
In this interview, we spoke with Tahleel Ahmad, Strategic Alliances & Partnership Manager, to better understand why they chose Trustpilot in the first place, and how they leverage reviews as a channel to engage with today’s travellers.
Trustpilot: Why did you choose Trustpilot?
Tahleel Ahmad: Being an OTA (Online Travel Agent), we primarily sell travel services to our customers. Trustpilot was brought in to get more feedback from our customers and better understand what we’re doing right, and what needs to be improved. It was part of our penetration strategy to list ourselves on a consumer review platform that helps us stick to our vision and deliver the best experiences possible to our customers.
TP: Are there multiple departments or teams using Trustpilot? If so, how are they using Trustpilot?
TA: Yes, multiple departments use Trustpilot and we have created multiple users for all those respective departments. Majority usage ranges from sending manual/bulk invitation links to tagging reviews, showcasing reviews specifically and analysing feedback.
TP: Where are you currently using Trustpilot?
TA: We’re currently showcasing our Trustpilot rating and reviews on many of our website’s pages. We have a ‘MicroStar’ widget on our homepage, which can be seen below:
Adding this small widget to our homepage helped us build trust among users and also helped boost the overall customer confidence. It contributed towards increasing the average user session by approximately 38%, and also drastically brought down the bounce back rate by 1193% across all channels.
We also use Trustpilot on all of our landing pages. Since we rely on varied marketing channels and the majority of them have specifically targeted landing pages, we decided to go with a ‘Carousel’ widget on top of the page footer, keeping our customers’ reviews throughout the site.
This proved to be really successful as in a month’s span only, Trustpilot recorded above 100K impressions since December 1st 2019, which clearly states its engagement with our audience.
In addition to the homepage and the landing pages, we’ve also added widgets to our product pages. In travel, the product page often refers to a complex package that can’t be booked online.
Our product pages contain holiday itineraries which are an outcome of a combination of flights, hotels, transfers & activities. We understand the customer psyche behind purchasing a complex package wherein a huge amount of trust needs to be placed as nobody would like to spoil a holiday experience to save a few pounds. To cater to this, we’ve placed a ‘Quote’ widget on all our product pages which include reviews with a ‘Recommended’ tag on it only.
This way, we are able to showcase our reviews wherein our customers have marked us as a recommended travel agency to intending buyers. This helped boost the trust among buyers and brought us an increase of 12% in the number of queries from product pages alone. Below is a screenshot of one of our product pages:
Our contact us page showcases all of our recent reviews too. We always aim for customers to reach out to us through a single channel in order to cut down on repetitive queries, so we’ve added a ‘Grid’ widget on the Contact Us page.
This grid only includes service reviews. This widget has brought down the number of customer queries from omnichannel to a single channel as the service reviews assure customers that we are quick enough to respond and solve their issues.
The same ‘Carousel’ website-wide widget appears on our checkout page too. To us, it was important to add social proof at such a crucial stage of the customer journey. This helps reassure the customer and boosts their overall confidence in our services.
We also like to work with ‘Google Seller Ratings’ which show up on all of our Google Ads.
Finally, we like showcasing our Trustpilot rating on emails. This is the signature I’ve got on my email followed by a confirmation email which is generated automatically when people book through us.
TP: Are there any other Trustpilot products you are currently using?
TA: Yes, we use review invitations to send bulk and manual invitations to our customers.
We also use the dashboard and analytics tools, which both play a pivotal role in providing insights on how we are doing.
Finally, we love using review tagging. As seen below, we’ve tagged ‘Service’, ‘Recommended’, ‘Pricing’, ‘Staff’, ‘Deals’, to our reviews. We can then filter the widgets down by tags based on which pages we’re showcasing them on.
TP: Which product features do you use most & what benefits do they bring
TA: Based on the reservations we receive on a daily basis, we manually upload invitations either individually by agents who look after their respective customers, or else a bulk upload to send out review invitations to our customers.
We use the get reviews feature to send out invitations and hear back from our customers, the template editor to use some creative content on invitations (the last one we did was to send out wishes on Christmas day & New Year’s Day along with invitations), the dashboard to get some quick insights on how are we performing, and the tags to ensure all the reviews posted by our users can be used either to showcase them.
The Benchmarking tool also proved to be an essential feature to help us compare our service level agreement with that of our competitors. This feature has enabled us to see that we have already outperformed our competitors in just 2 months of operations.
TP: It’s great to see you are using Trustpilot in so many different ways. Have you measured any other improvements from using reviews?
TA: After December 2019, we gained ‘Google Seller Ratings’, which made stars visible in all of our paid Google campaigns, and we added widgets on respective landing pages which has brought a 51.61% increase in CTR, followed by a massive 102.95% raise in conversions and a whopping 50.34% drop in bounce rate for Google campaigns. We also saw an overall growth in site traffic including 20.40% rise in time on page, a 5.53% rise in transactions, and a 17.33% growth in the overall revenue.
TP: How have you used insights from Trustpilot reviews to improve the business?
TA: In the very inception of our operations, we realised that customers in the past were not quite happy with our services, specifically with the delivery of e-tickets and the online booking system. We soon picked both up and the results are now on the world wide web:
Thanks to Trustpilot, we are able to improve on the service excellence before it could’ve done some serious damage to the business.
Similarly, bad reviews from unhappy customers were also a concern as it had started raising questions on business reliability and trustworthiness. We have now tackled it and the results are outstanding:
Cancellation and refunds were also the source of customer frustration. When we realised the issues our customers were having, we were able to correct our processes. We now have 4 and 5-star reviews from customers who have performed cancellations and have either received their refund or are awaiting it.
Thankfully, we have overcome all of our customers’ concerns because we were able to listen to our customers using Trustpilot reviews.
TP: What does your TrustScore mean to you and the business?
TA: We currently have a TrustScore of 4.7/5, and we certainly value it. For us, the TrustScore is a sign of:
Credibility
Reliability
Trustworthiness
Happy Customers
Business Competitiveness.
TP: What advice would you give to a business thinking of using Trustpilot?
TA: If you are offering either products or services and are really proud about serving your customers - Trustpilot is a space to let the world know about it. Improved conversions, added traffic, never ending growth in revenue is something we are witnessing from using our customer reviews as a channel.
It’s all about coming out of your office space, and letting the world know that your business is making someone’s day.
If you’d like to learn more about Trustpilot and how customer reviews can help you improve your business, request a free demo below.