Retail POS system provider Vend says it has brought down online review response times to as little as minutes since integrating Trustpilot with its company Slack channel.

Trustpilot is a Danish consumer review website, which hosted 33 million reviews last year alone, with a new review coming in every second. Many retail businesses integrate Trustpilot reviews on the company homepage, which can be automatically filtered by segments; for example, customer service, or product quality.

“It’s real time, unfiltered information, which is very core to our product culture. We’re very focused on getting constant insight and having continuous discovery,” Vend director of product management, Anne Droge tells RetailBiz.

Vend has some 8,000 customers in Australia, with a further 4,000 in New Zealand in the APAC region. In April, Vend was acquired by Montreal-based retail POS system provider Lightspeed, rebranding its product to ‘Vend by Lightspeed’.

Now that Vend is part of a global business, Vend marketing and brand specialist, Kathryn Speirs tells RetailBiz, “Because we do have employees located across the globe, whoever is live in that time will be best equipped to answer the question.

“In the past when it was email, we’d have to wait a 12 hour period for the right person to be coming online and responding in that lifetime. Now we have whoever is best equipped at that point in time to get back to that.”

Now, Vend says it can get back to reviews within a matter of minutes, and more importantly, the product managers and senior executives on the team have a better oversight of customer feedback in real-time.

Droge says, “We then see if the customer is open to follow up chat, like a little interview. I think that is really core to how we work. It’s so instrumental to have that constant stream of feedback and data and information.

“We like the fact that it’s real time, and unfiltered makes it so powerful. It really enables us to act very fast to get back to the customer but also, of course, gives us that real time insight which of course is so key.”

Because you can automatically filter the reviews from Trustpilot to go directly into specific chat channels, you can ensure the right members of the team are getting on top of things quickly. If you’re a CEO or senior leader too, you can immediately have some oversight into specific areas of your retail business.

Trustpilot country manager for Australia and New Zealand, Cameron Buckley says, “The beauty of a tool like Slack is that everyone can see it. You know, from the founder, to CEO to someone that’s coming as a graduate and everyone in between.

“So, encourage people to get in there, look at it, because it gives you the ability to get a view on your business today rather than in previously slower reporting cycles that might be weekly or monthly.”

What’s key, Buckley says, is making sure you’re always responsive to online reviews, especially with platforms like Trustpilot.

“If there are reviews that are coming in, and they’re not five stars or four stars, there’s always a learning in there. So dig, dig deeper, have the conversation about that learning, respond quickly. And consumers appreciate and respect that.

“You could potentially turn a negative into a positive if you’ve got that discipline around doing that.”