How AO has made trust its USP – and why negative reviews are important

Online electrical retailer AO positions itself as ‘The UK’s most trusted electrical retailer’. Operating in a category where products should be reliable and long-lasting, and as an online-only retailer with no physical premises, AO’s team understand that consumer confidence in its products and services is critical.

“We would often talk around … what was our USP? What really was our right to win in the retail space?” says Vicky Monk, Director of Brand and Marketing at AO. “…We’re in a digital era [where] a lot of retailers can offer a lot of the same things to the consumer, [so] what are some of those more stand-out messages? … Ours always came back to customer service.”

In 2022, AO’s marketing team took the step of incorporating trust into the brand’s positioning and advertising, and even though the benefit of an intangible quality like ‘trust’ can be difficult to measure, the approach has delivered results.

I spoke to Monk and to Alicia Skubick, Chief Customer Officer at Trustpilot, the independent platform through which AO manages customer feedback, about how AO has used customer insights to improve its business; how resolving negative reviews can build brand trust; and how Trustpilot itself maintains a high level of trust in its service.

“People are talking about you whether you see it or not”: the case for handling negative reviews

In order to encourage customer feedback, AO has integrated reviews into its customer relationship management (CRM) as part of purpose-built journeys, and has conducted testing to determine the best time to ask customers for a review. Monk describes the request for feedback as “just one of many touchpoints post-purchase” – customers will be sent a reminder several days later about leaving a review, but only one.

This needs to be distinct from a review of the product, since customers are reviewing the service from AO, not the manufacturer brands it stocks – although sometimes the review will incorporate product elements.

Part of AO’s approach to customer feedback includes a dedicated team who are responsible for responding for any 1-3 star reviews within 24 hours. While AO has a high rating overall, averaging 4.9 stars out of 5 across more than 750,000 reviews, Monk candidly acknowledges that “we don’t always get it right … But where we don’t get it right, we do an amazing job at fixing it.”

On the business case for rapidly handling negative reviews, Monk observes, “These reviews are happening whether retailers or brands like it or not – you can choose to embrace it, or you can try and ignore it.

“I think the latter is not the way to go – because by embracing what people are telling you is going wrong through the journey, it guides you to fix problems you might not know exist.”

Trustpilot’s Alicia Skubick concurs, adding, “Such a common conversation [with marketers and businesses] is … ‘What if we do this and we get really bad feedback?’ Our response to that is: ‘People are talking about you whether you are seeing it or not.’

“We always talk about a bad review being the start of a better business: knowing that gives you tangible data … Where are the trends? Where are people unhappy? [You can] really have those insights and make the process better, but also respond to that feedback.

“With loyalty and trust, sometimes it doesn’t come from a great experience; it comes from something maybe not going perfectly, but the way [the brand] resolve it and go that extra mile.”

A consumer-first culture “embedded all the way through the business”

AO’s team use data from the Trustpilot platform to categorise 1-3 star reviews and pick out key themes that show where issues can be addressed. “Some have cost implications on the business; others will ultimately result in removing cost, and that’s the way that I don’t think businesses ever look at this,” says Monk. “Sometimes [when we] go through fixing problems, we’re finding that we’re generating efficiencies in the business as a result.”

Some of the notable improvements that have been introduced on the back of addressing negative reviews include driver pre-calls, in order to ensure that a customer will be in to receive their delivery; and a live driver dashboard that enables driver performance to be tracked throughout the day so that any issues can be addressed proactively.

In another instance, more than a thousand product listings were removed from AO’s website because they lacked product dimensions – while this did impact sales, it also resulted in the issue being very quickly resolved. “Within less than a week, they were back on-site – if [the product removal] had happened over time, it might have taken us three, four, five weeks to get those product dimensions back on,” Monk says.

This kind of quick action to resolve problems is possible because Monk’s team are empowered to “make the decision about what happens when it comes to any implications on trust”, something that she notes stems down from the very top of the business.

“We’ve been here for 25 years, and [customer-centricity] has always been [CEO John Roberts’] ethos. … That’s embedded all the way through the business.”

Quantifying the success of trust

Monk notes that while many retailers will split up review infrastructure across a range of different providers, AO has chosen to focus all of its efforts on a single platform and a single score.

AO has been using Trustpilot’s paid solution since 2012, and beginning in November 2022, the business took the step of incorporating its Trustpilot score into marketing and advertising alongside messaging about trust. This has included social media, where AO has built Facebook, Instagram and TikTok campaigns around its trust USP, such as by using positive customer feedback to tell a story or celebrating Trustpilot review milestones.

@ao

This is Abbie’s AO review, one of the half a million on Trustpilot! ???? Here’s what she had to say, from the AOers that create an amazing experience for our customers every day ???? #aoletsgo #trustpilotreviews #deliverydriver

♬ original sound – AO Lets Go

“We saw it as a key differentiator that was built on a legacy of … 25 years of amazing customer service,” says Monk. “We really felt like ‘Now is the time that we should start shouting about that to our consumers’.”

Monk acknowledges that it is difficult to track the ROI on something like embedding trust language into ad messaging. The brand partnered with Kantar to study the impact of introducing trust messaging into its advertising, and found that among 35 to 64-year-olds, AO experienced a 10 percentage point increase in brand confidence, perceived worth, and the feeling that it met category needs once Trustpilot was included in the creative.

AO also carries out regular ‘data dips’ of key metrics every quarter to study the ongoing performance of its marketing. Some of the strongest reinforcement, however, comes from anecdotal evidence.

“If we feel like we’re hearing people talk about it, and relay the message: ‘They’re the UK’s most trusted electrical retailer’ – once you hear people start saying it back to you, you know it’s started to get embedded from a consumer perspective,” Monk says.

How Trustpilot maintains trust in its customer feedback offering

The effectiveness of Trustpilot as a platform for customer feedback also depends on trust, as consumers need to have confidence in the authenticity and verifiability of reviews left on the platform and in the scores used by businesses.

“Trust is so fundamental to everything that we do,” says Skubick. “We are constantly … looking at how we do a better job – constantly looking at our technology [and] how we protect the integrity of the platform.” Fake and fraudulent reviews, for example, are a major concern, and in 2024 the company introduced a raft of new safeguarding measures to identify fake reviews and policy violations, which included implementing generative AI-powered guideline software.

Trustpilot’s team is also concerned with how to help both businesses and consumers use reviews to best effect: “Is the review funnel easy [for consumers] – is it clear to them? How do we help them to write the best reviews and make them meaningful and have content?

“Improving our mobile app – we’re introducing an even better notification centre … where you can see any outstanding reviews from purchases and you can go through and tick that off.”

This also benefits businesses in obtaining feedback, and Trustpilot is working to further develop its insights and review follow-ups to help businesses. In 2024, the company introduced AI-enhanced insights as well as AI-assisted review response tools to help businesses reply quickly to feedback.

AO is looking ahead to its 1 million reviews milestone, having passed 750,000 reviews recently and celebrated by recognising the teams and individuals who were named as doing excellent work in positive reviews. “Because we are so obsessive about our negative reviews – making sure we fix our problems – sometimes you forget about celebrating the successes,” says Monk.

“We’re hoping that [every customer] is a customer for life … [people] come back time and time again when it comes to buying electronics, and that grows revenue.”