Transavia & TripAdvisor: How customer feedback generates double value

If you are like me then you want to hear what your customer has to say about your product and service so you can improve it. But what do you do with very positive feedback?

You use it as a motivation for your colleagues but you can also use it to sell more of your products :-) . Who better to endorse your product than a happy customer?

Showing TripAdvisor ratings next to our flights sold up to 2.3% more tickets

The thing we found with TripAdvisor ratings is that our customers love to take the time to rate us and help us improve. Even better, we have created a special customer service feedback loop so that the questions asked via TripAdvisor get answered as soon as possible by our employees.

We gather this feedback by proactively asking our customers to rate their specific Transavia flight when they get back from their journey.

So now it was time to use this feedback on our website so that other customers could see how our flights were rated by their peers. Not too long ago we have done an A/B test where we've showed the customer rating from TripAdvisor next to our flights. The results were amazing...!

When doing the A/B test for this functionality three things stood out:

1.   Customers love to see feedback of other customers. This also shows in the sale figures. In the A/B test, the version with the TripAdvisor rating sold 2.3% more tickets than the version without!

2.   Even though our rating average is very good, some flights rate less than others. The interesting thing is that the weight of the rating did not have any impact on sales figures. Just showing the rating was enough to generate more sales! So don’t be afraid to be transparent to your customers. On the contrary; good service and customer centered transparency will always help you.

3.   Be as specific as possible. For now we show the ratings per flight but when the final version goes live, we intend to show the ratings per flight number for maximum transparency.

Our next steps in this cooperation will be:

1. Use our TripAdvisor API for real-time results on all of our flights
2. Optimize the look and feel of this element for best results
3. Define other relevant digital channels where we can use the power of feedback

Vanja is a member of several Conversion Optimization expert groups but foremost responsible for introducing CRO to Transavia. In two years his team went from testing nothing at all to testing almost everything they build. Recognizing that every organization has the need for their own CRO approach, Vanja has dealt with problems most of the Conversion Specialist are dealing with and succeeded in implementing it in a big Agile organization. Vanja believes that CRO is bigger than optimizing websites and is going to expand the optimization activities broader across all of the digital domains of Transavia.