Vauxhall | Case Study | Feefo

Vauxhall Motors, the UK’s oldest car-manufacturer remains at the forefront of British motoring with an innovative range of cars, SUVs and vans inspired by the needs of customers.

Driven by the aim of ‘delighting their customers’, Vauxhall took the decision to integrate Feefo’s customer reviews and insights platform to deliver a deeper understanding of their customer experience. As a result the company has increased the amount of time consumers spend on its website by almost a fifth. A combination of verified reviews and customer-generated photographs has given its website a warmer, more authentic, human feel that has been a definite hit with consumers.

The Challenge

In a highly competitive market dominated by multi-national manufacturers, Vauxhall’s website is essential to how it competes, presents its vehicles and engages with hundreds of thousands of customers every day.

Vauxhall wanted to use user-generated content to transform the marketing power of their website, build brand confidence among potential car-buyers and create more meaningful engagement. With greater prominence on its website, this content would make the site feel far more user-friendly and authentic, placing the customer firmly centre-stage.

“Feefo has helped us give our web pages a far more engaging, human feel that makes visitors want to stay longer. It’s down to the quality of the content Feefo empowers our customers to set their own stamp on the website. In terms of our strategy it’s really important and the out-of-the-box integration has been very impressive.”

Jonny Evans, Digital User Experience & E-Commerce Manager

The Solution

After considering a number of review services, Vauxhall selected Feefo to replace its previous platform.

“Feefo was superior in every way, just in terms of what you can do, right out-of-the-box.” Jonny Evans, Digital User Experience & E-Commerce Manager said. “We can do pretty much whatever we want to because the functionality is there to do it from the early implementation stage. When we moved to a new website platform, out of all the applications we moved, Feefo was the easiest.”

Vauxhall customised the Feefo review system to give it distinctive character that closely matched their own brand. When customers are invited to post feedback they are also asked to submit a picture of their vehicle. The photographs, reviews and star ratings are unmissable on the home page and add a layer of authenticity that consumers instantly relate to. This, coupled alongside the star ratings appearing on the individual car model pages, go a long way toward increasing trust in the Vauxhall brand and positively influencing the buying behaviour of consumers.

As part of its commitment to creating the most customer-friendly site possible, Vauxhall has also deployed Feefo’s AI-powered Smart Themes functionality. This enables visitors to save time finding the aspects of review content that most interests them, such as a car’s boot space or MPG, by quickly selecting from a set of pre-determined “topics”. This is a huge advantage to Vauxhall over it’s competitors, especially now consumers are accustomed to fast service and quick access to information.

The Results

In the year since it deployed Feefo, Vauxhall has seen a 19% increase in the amount of time visitors spend on its site and an 18% reduction in the bounce rate. The volume of reviews has also increased, thanks to a more determined push from Vauxhall.

One of the chief benefits of Feefo for Evans is how the platform’s automation has enabled collection of reviews from customers at different stages of their buying process – something that would never have been possible otherwise. Most of all, however, the prominence of truly engaging customer-generated content has given the entire website a warmer, friendlier, more human feel, in contrast to some of the clinical, technology-obsessed competitor sites.

“We find people respond much better to what other people think of our cars,” said Evans. “Consumers are influenced by what their peers buy and say, so it’s important to create customer advocates for our brand. As consumers we all want to know what people like us think and feel about the car we’re interested in. It’s the best set of recommendations there is.”

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