How Manfrotto uses reviews to build a customer centric strategy

This case study was written by Letizia Binda and Ilenia Bellucci.

From starting in a garage to becoming a multinational company, Northern Italy-based Manfrotto has spent the past 50 years investing in technology to provide high-quality photography equipment to professionals, enthusiasts, and the media and entertainment industry.*

Their product offering includes a wide range of camera tripods, lighting stands, and bags. With their “Imagine More” motto, Manfrotto Distribution operates in Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States, Japan, China, and Hong Kong.

*We spoke with Alberto Dal Santo, Divisional Digital Strategist at Manfrotto, to learn how Trustpilot helped them implement a customer centric strategy.

Why Trustpilot?

Having decided to build its eCommerce strategy on customers’ needs, Manfrotto was looking for innovative and compelling approaches to increase customer satisfaction and their overall customer experience. This led them to consider and eventually choose Trustpilot as an important partner. By actively collecting reviews, Manfrotto can understand what buyers think about its business and, if needed, target specific areas of improvement. This would allow them to enhance their products and services and develop trust-based relationships with clients, which translates into more sales and new reviews - in a virtuous circle.

We decided to sign up for Trustpilot because we wanted to tailor our overall eCommerce strategy around our customers’ needs. Thanks to Trustpilot, we can collect our customers' thoughts and needs to improve our business and their satisfaction.

How Manfrotto uses Trustpilot

At Manfrotto, reviews are a company matter: different departments actively engage with Trustpilot features and reviews on a daily basis. This is what really makes the difference for a customer-centric company like this one. Every team benefits from the user-generated content.

On the management level, review data and trends are analyzed, allowing the teams to define winning strategies, which is especially crucial when operating in several markets. At the end of each month, all the country managers share their findings and problems and collectively decide if the adopted solutions can be useful to other markets or if it is country-specific. With Trustpilot, Manfrotto’s problem-solving process is faster and cheaper.

We use reviews to get insights on how to improve our service and operations, passing them to the customer service or product marketing team and trying to always respond to bad reviews in order to turn them positive.

What happens if Manfrotto receives a 1 or 2 star review? Shying away from negative feedback is certainly not the answer. The company’s Customer Service team dedicates special attention to customers who are not fully satisfied with their buying experience, for one reason or another. Agents answer those reviews in no time, and requesting more details, are able to reach out to the customers privately, pinpoint what went wrong, and rectify any false step. Manfrotto quickly understood that the best way to regain someone’s trust is learning by past mistakes and do its best to fix whatever did not go as it should have.

Manfrotto is on the right path of its review journey: collecting reviews, answering reviews, and learning from feedback. The next step? Let the customers speak on their own behalf. For this reason, both service and product reviews TrustBoxes have been implemented on the business website, showing the overall star rating and product opinions. To ensure a seamless integration with its design and branding, Manfrotto used Trustpilot APIs to develop eye-catching customized widgets to demonstrate the benefits and the trustworthiness of their products.

Outstanding results using Trustpilot

Manfrotto built a great reputation thanks to online reviews in a short time, showing an outstanding TrustScore in every market it operates in. These results confirm the high level of customer happiness and satisfaction, obtained through the delivery of a great buying experience.

Another goal achieved by Manfrotto through Trustpilot is the traffic increase in paid campaigns, specifically Google Shopping and Google Ads. The game changer was the moment Manfrotto got its 150th review, which, together with an overall score above 3.5/5, made the Italian company eligible for Google Seller Ratings in its markets. After implementing Trustpilot, Manfrotto registered an average 30% uplift in the CTR for its Google Shopping campaigns, definitely a brilliant result, confirmed by the Google Ads campaigns as shown in the table below.

Looking ahead

This partnership is growing stronger: Manfrotto and Trustpilot are looking toward the future together. One of the next steps will be exploring the possibility of leveraging social media channels through Trustpilot reviews. Manfrotto is open for suggestions on how Trustpilot can help foster brand advocacy online and enhance email marketing, with the end goal of spreading Manfrotto’s reputation even more.

If you too want to start showcasing your company's reputation online, create a free Trustpilot account below.