Interview with Tony Wheble, CEO & Chairman at Customer Insights Platform: Feefo

Feefo is a verified customer reviews platform that enables businesses to gather reliable insights to optimise customer experience (CX), build loyalty, boost sales and drive growth.

Our unique invite-only model means that only verified buyers of a product or service can provide feedback of their experience, so our clients can be sure they are getting accurate and trusted data from real customers.

While it is our core product, Feefo is not just about reviews. We have a powerful suite of software tools and technical solutions expertise to help clients gain a much deeper understanding of their customers’ sentiment, behaviour, and intent, empowering them with actionable insights to make better business decisions and improve their return on investment.

We examine the entire user journey, so we are able to present a complete picture of the customer experience.
 
 

 

What is Feefo’s mission? What is the idea behind the company?

 
Our mission is to empower our clients to understand how their customers experience their product or service – from the start to the end of the CX journey. By utilising these insights, we want to encourage them to deliver better customer experiences and ultimately see better business outcomes.

Many of our competitors simply look at the customer experience post-purchase, and so provide an incomplete picture. Today, social proof is more and more influential. 88% of consumers trust user reviews as much as personal recommendations, and 96% look at product reviews before purchasing, so we want to help our customers leverage and optimise their social proof.
 

How has Feefo evolved during the course of the coronavirus pandemic?

 
As a digitally oriented technology business, we have adapted well to remote working and collaboration. Fortunately, we are in a dynamic growth area and have continued to grow during the last year by assisting our clients with a range of services that ultimately help them to deliver improved customer journey experiences. But, like many businesses, the coronavirus crisis gave us cause to pause and re-evaluate our direction.

We’ve recognised the critical importance of supporting and developing deepening relationships with our existing client base and refocused our energies on delighting our customers. This has led to us increasing our investment in Customer Success and Sales Development.

Historically, we were quite reviews and acquisition focussed, whereas post-pandemic our objective is to provide more holistic CX solutions provision to both existing and new clients.
 

What can we hope to see from Feefo in the future?

 
We have just hired our first Chief Product Officer who starts in April. This is part of our drive to invest more in our product to provide continued value, but also to develop more innovative solutions which genuinely excite our customers.

We know there’s a real appetite for innovation within the reviews and customer insights sphere which has long enjoyed the benefits of market growth, often without creating anything new. Feefo is already recognised for providing a unique service in the reviews space, due to our verified buyer offering. Now we intend to strengthen our offering further to provide our clients with even more added value insight.

Which areas of CX most excite you currently?

The past twelve months have shown us that it’s never been more important to understand your customer’s digital behaviour, across every demographic.

Accelerated digital and mobile adoption, especially amongst senior market segments, has rocketed due to Covid. I believe this is an exciting opportunity for businesses with a digital presence to engage with a new demographic, but it also means that more important than ever to invest in each customer touchpoint to create an experience that is personalised and delights. For our part, we want to help our customers understand this new opportunity and engage effectively with them.