Mountain Equipment Co-op presents customer reviews in two languages
Online customer reviews have become popular among many retail sites, but addressing multiple languages among customers is another matter. Mountain Equipment Co-op has deployed a new PowerReviews application to present reviews in French and English.
“As Canada’s leading outdoor retailer, we aim to provide our English and French members with the highest level of service, regardless of their language preference,” says George Weetman, Mountain Equipment’s web content and marketing manager. Mountain Equipment is No. 410 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide.
Since deploying the multi-language reviews application three weeks ago, Mountain Equipment Co-op has received about 20-30 reviews per day posted by customers to its retail web site, Mec.ca, even though the retailer has not yet promoted the feature. “We’re a tight-knit group of co-op members and the word has spread quickly,” Weetman says. The retailer will soon start to promote the reviews application on its home page and in e-mail marketing messages, he adds.
The reviews application does not translate customer-generated content in order to present the same content in both English and French, however, so as to avoid any inaccuracies, Weetman says. But Mec.ca’s shoppers, many of whom are bilingual, can link directly from the English reviews to view French content, and vice versa, he adds.
Although the reviews application is too new to show the impact on conversion rates and sales, Mountain Equipment is satisfied with the product and has found it to produce useful information for in-house product developers as well for shoppers, Weetman says.
The reviews feature also serves to improve in-store customer service, because store shoppers can log onto Mec.ca to read reviews as well as check other product details through the several web-based terminals Mountain Equipment Co-op makes available to shoppers in each of its 12 stores, Weetman says.
PowerReviews provides a single global review platform for multiple languages, rather than a separate platform for each language, the company says. The platform currently handles Spanish, German and Italian in addition to English and French, and PowerReviews says it will support the Chinese, Korean and Japanese languages later this year.
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