How Trustpilot is helping Ostrom build a greener world with customer feedback
About Ostrom
Ostrom is a Certified B Corp™ digital energy management platform founded in 2021 and based in Berlin, Germany. Ostrom makes green electricity affordable and straightforward for German households.
Their custom app (which integrates with dozens of partner brands and hundreds of devices from various electric vehicles, EV chargers, heat pumps and smart home appliances) allows customers to view their energy consumption and control their tariff.
In 2021, Ostrom started using Trustpilot as a front-and-center platform to help the company stay accountable to its customer base. This, in turn, helped provide a strong trust signal to future customers.
Problem
Ostrom needed a way to expand its customer base and promote and accelerate the transition from fossil fuels to green energy.
Solution
Ostrom used Trustpilot reviews and insights as a key internal metric. Positive reviews encouraged more customers to be green, while insights contributed to app improvements.
Result
Trustpilot’s strong presence across Ostrom’s customer journey, including billboards, social media, TV ads, widgets, and digital marketing, contributed to better sign-up processes and app features.
“Trust is very important, especially in the green energy and climate space, as there has been a boom of new providers on top of many large incumbents and unscrupulous discounter energy providers. When everyone seems to make the same claims, trust markers like the TrustScore that shows authentic customer interactions are crucial to differentiate oneself.”
Trustpilot covers the Ostrom landscape
According to the Centre for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Württemberg (ZSW) and utility association BDEW, German citizens are moving towards a greener future. In 2023, renewable energies covered almost 52% of gross electricity consumption.
For Ostrom, green electricity must be easy to come by. They sell energy at cost and utilize technology like their custom app to make the entire process seamless. But fair pricing can only go so far. Ostrom Co-Founder and CMO/CPO Karl Villanueva saw the necessity of building a trusting and loyal customer base.
“Trustpilot is the most trusted of trust markers, and users and customers genuinely trust that the reviews here are accurate and not just for the benefit of the reviewed company. This means that working towards a high Trustpilot score benefits both customers and the company itself to create an even better product,” says Karl.
Multiple Ostrom teams use Trustpilot reviews and insights in different ways. “Marketing uses it in our acquisition ads as a trust marker. The tech and product teams use it to help guide new feature development, and our operations team uses it as a main customer satisfaction KPI,” says Karl.
Trust in every step
Trustpilot is embedded in all aspects of Ostrom’s customer journey. Trustpilot reviews are present in ads and marketing, both online and static, such as TV advertisements and even billboards on Alexanderplatz in Berlin.
Ostrom features its 4.8 Excellent TrustScore (Status June 2024) online across its social media channels, like Instagram and Facebook. With Trustpilot, Ostrom saw a 50% uplift in social ad engagement when using Trustpilot star ratings.
According to Karl, the company website includes Trustpilot in the form of the TrustBox website widgets across its entire homepage and other widgets featured on separate pages, creating “a positive increase in organic traffic.”
Finding success with co-branding
Website widgets featuring the most recent reviews help potential customers better understand the company's offerings.
Once customers sign up, an automated system invites them to leave a review. Ostrom then utilizes natural language processing tools to analyze these reviews, gleaning valuable insights into areas where they do well and where there may be room for improvement.
“We tend to see that after visiting our page, customers still would search for things like “ostrom erfahrungen” and then would see our Trustpilot reviews,” says Karl.
Research shows that including Trustpilot branding across different channels increases consumers' likelihood of clicking on an advert with a five-star Trustpilot score.
Making use of Trustpilot features
Ostrom currently uses Trustpilot’s A/B testing feature, The TrustBox Optimizer, which allows users to see how different materials perform with and without Trustpilot reviews. The team ran a test on Trustpilot email templates, and the results showed a 2X uplift compared to email templates without Trustpilot.
“We definitely found that a more playful and personal touch was better than a formal-sounding email,” says Karl.
With Trustpilot’s analytics features like Review insights, Ostrom pulls data from reviews to better understand their market value and customer sentiment tools to see where competitors rank and how customers feel about their product.
Additionally, customer feedback provided by Trustpilot reveals how Ostrom can keep growing its product to benefit a green future.
“We get new product ideas through our customers, which become features of our app. New features like making our signup easier or making the graphs on our app better for them to track their energy usage have stemmed from customer feedback and reviews via Trustpilot,” explains Karl.