Golf Experten is a Danish golf sports marketplace with over 6 physical locations, a 35-40-person sales team per store, and a robust web presence. A well-known store with over 20 years of experience, Golf Experten is a relatively young Trustpilot subscriber but has already seen major results from collecting reviews. We spoke to Kim Jacobsen, eCommerce and Marketing at Golf Experten, to discuss how Golf Experten has utilized Trustpilot.
Getting Closer to Customers: Collecting reviews to drive business insights
“We’ve always wanted our sales team to deliver the best customer service possible as a way to differentiate ourselves from the competition.”
Several years ago, Golf Experten shifted their business strategy and approach to become more customer-centric. They struggled with the challenge of balancing sports expertise with a sales-focused strategy. The stores were already well known for their products, the quality of their service, and the expertise of their employees, but they saw an opportunity to capitalize on their strengths by increasing their focus on customers.
However, Golf Experten headquarters (HQ) felt like they didn’t have enough visibility into the day-to-day sentiment of their customers visiting their six stores. Without this necessary insight, it would be harder to take a customer-first approach to better train their sales team and improve their customer experience. This is what brought them to Trustpilot.
Golf Experten saw collecting reviews as an opportunity to derive business insights straight from the customers. Using Trustpilot’s pre-tagging feature, they were able to map reviews to the stores and sales reps responsible for them, creating an aggregate rating for each store and rep. This allowed them to understand customers’ feedback and identify where certain issues arose. At the onset of collecting reviews, Golf Experten found that the majority of negative reviews came from a single store with the same complaint around customer service.
Armed with this new information, Golf Experten worked directly with their sales representatives to address the underlying issue. The results were immediate: the store has not had a single negative review written about them since.
What is Pre-tagging?
Pre-tagging allows you to automatically attach data such as customer data, marketing data, customer journey/flow data from your CRM or other systems to your reviews. Trustpilot’s built-in dashboards help you analyze your tagged reviews to generate actionable business insights. Businesses have unlimited flexibility in how they tag reviews, allowing them to learn more from reviews and map insights to what’s important to them. By having more data available at the point of invitation, businesses can obtain better and more applicable business insights.
“By pre-tagging reviews, we were able to see which store customer reviews referred to, allowing us to directly talk to specific stores about how to improve their customer experience.”
Golf Experten now had an effective process to improve their customer service across all their stores. They matched reviews to stores, found patterns among bad reviews (if any), relayed the feedback to the stores, addressed the issues, solved problems, and were able to apply any new learnings across all their stores.
This new process helped Golf Experten take a customer centric approach to their sales strategy from a foundational level to ensure no store lacked the training or insight.
Using Reviews to Accelerate Organizational Maturity and Success
After each store’s branch managers were educated on the benefits of collecting reviews, they were happy to collect reviews, whether good or bad, knowing they could learn from reviews and incrementally improve their stores to benefit customers.
After seeing how much the branch managers and stores were embracing the reviews, HQ began tracking each store’s Trustpilot rating as a KPI (Key Performance Indicators) alongside others such as sales and revenue. The ratings were also incorporated in a monthly newsletter that HQ sent out, where the stores were ranked by their Trustscore.
“Some of our sales team’s behavior changed quite dramatically after we began collecting reviews.”
This fostered a healthy competitiveness among the branch managers who would often conduct meetings after the newsletters are sent, to see how they can bring their scores up even higher. Their competitiveness and commitment to excellent customer service is evident in Golf Experten’s TrustScore, which at the time of writing, is 9.4/10.
2016 was the best year from a financial standpoint for Golf Experten, according to Kim. While he can’t point to Trustpilot as being the sole reason for their success, he happily pointed out that ‘Every tool matters and Trustpilot has been important’ as a database and reference point to improve Customer Experience. This commitment to customers have proven to be very impactful for Golf Experten and will continue to drive the company’s success.
“Everyone now sees reviews as a way to improve themselves, they welcome it.”
Utilizing Reviews As Part of an Integrated Marketing Strategy
Looking ahead to 2017 and beyond, Kim expects to integrate Trustpilot into existing and future marketing initiatives. Golf Experten publishes a product catalogue six times a year and sends it to 50,000 of their best customers. In future publications, the company plans to showcase customer feedback more and will use Trustpilot to feed that content.
They’ll also be using Trustpilot on printed assets, to give out in stores. This will help Golf Experten show their standing as a well-reviewed company while also encouraging customers to leave reviews. On the digital marketing front, Golf Experten will be launching a new webshop in fall 2017, where they will display TrustBoxes more prominently, baking in Trustpilot’s integrations as part of the launch. They will be testing its performance and have a good feeling that by displaying their score more often on their website, that they will see increases in conversions, average basket/order size, and higher revenue as a result. Given that many of our other clients have experienced similar results, we’d be surprised if the new integration didn’t lead to better success.
Trustpilot has already proven to be hugely successful in leveraging customer reviews to generate important business insights, helping Golf Experten become more customer-centric, and improving their customer experience across all their physical locations. After using Trustpilot as a way to address their customers’ issues and and implementing a new customer-centric sales strategy, leading to improved customer feedback across all stores, they plan to use Trustpilot’s digital marketing benefits, leveraging social proof and customer-generated content to improve their print and digital marketing initiatives.
We’ve been very excited to hear about the success Golf Experten has found using Trustpilot and we’re eager to discover how Trustpilot will make 2017 even better for them.
If you want to hear about the ways Trustpilot can help you elevate your business, request a free demo below.
