Showing posts from: eSpares Updates

My Dyson DC25 Adventure

July 8, 2010 | eSpares Updates | General Appliance Care & Advice | No comments

Hubert is working with the eSpares marketing team for a couple of weeks on a work experience placement. Yesterday, he was tasked with being the video production assistant on the filming of some Dyson DC25 fix-it videos. We asked him to write a few words on his experience of the day:

I’ve always thought that instructional videos must take seconds to make; grab the product, grab the part, get an expert and voilà – “Thanks for watching!”. However, I got the chance to join the eSpares team for a video shoot as a part of my work experience.

As soon as the planning commenced, I realised that I’d obviously been quite wrong. It’s a much more complicated process, luckily sped up by great feedback from the eSpares community. It all starts long before the shoot with planning of what videos to make and which spares to feature, based on customer reviews and questions. The video team works with the customer service team to establish what kind of queries eSpares customers have been asking to establish what videos are likely to be needed most.

The main purpose, obviously, is to help the customers fix it themselves with appliance spare parts – but it is also to point out the easiest ways of doing that. Before the day of the shoot, all the customer reviews of the products to be featured are carefully examined for anything that eSpares customers have learnt and taken the time to share. Scrutinising the reviews of the Dyson DC25 spares was actually my job this week, so I hope I did a good job of it.

Once we got there, the first thing we had to do was to set up the working area and to perfect what we had to do. Before instructing customers, the eSpares video team like to do the actions they are showing a bunch of times just to make sure it’s been done right and perfectly – in this case it involved assembling and dissembling the Dyson DC25 over and over again.

After that’s been done, it’s time for shooting; as with any movie, it may either take one perfect take or absolutely loads of tries to get everything spot on. Throughout the day, in a flurry of good and bad attempts, coffee breaks and lunch, we managed to get some really good takes, thanks to the patience of Helen (the video star) and Gabe (the director).

You can see the videos on the website and YouTube in a few days; for now, I hope I have indeed helped a bunch of Dyson DC25 owners to service their machine.

The Power of Reviews

July 1, 2010 | eSpares Updates | No comments

It’s nearly 2 years since we opened up the eSpares website to ratings and reviews. All of our customers can share their opinions about the products they’ve bought. Since then we’ve had tens of thousands of reviews of the parts we sell.

The reviews are moderated before they go live on the site, just to make sure that there’s no swearing or anything offensive. But so long as the review relates to the product and your experience of fitting or using it, it goes up on the site; irrespective of whether it’s positive or negative.

Now, you might think that negative reviews are something that we’d not welcome. After all, everyone prefers praise to criticism (even if the disapproval is of the products and not us!). But it’s probably the negative reviews that have had more of an impact on our business than the positive ones. Here are some reasons why:

Credibility
If all the reviews of a product are glowingly positive then people can be a bit suspicious about their authenticity. A mix of positive and negative reviews shows that they can be trusted.

The More Information the Better
There may be important information in those negative reviews that will inform other customers about whether it’s the right product for them or whether they can fit it themselves. For instance, if a customer can see from other customers’ reviews that a part is particularly difficult to fit, they may choose to call a professional repair person rather than tackling it themselves. We’d much rather that than have a frustrated customer.

We Know What Videos to Shoot
The eSpares website is now packed with great videos that show you how to fit spare parts yourself. We read all the reviews and this informs us of where to focus our efforts in producing new videos. If we see that customers are frustrated with fitting a certain product, we’ll go and shoot a video to help show other customers how to do it.

Product Quality Issues
Although we check all of the spares we send out, it’s usually only with use that quality issues come to light. Customers don’t always return items that have manufacturing faults, but they do tell us through reviews.

If a product gets poor reviews then we’re able to see that very quickly and can work with the manufacturer to improve the quality. This happened recently with a batch of dishwasher cutlery baskets that had a manufacturing fault. We were able to identify the faulty batch and get them replaced quickly because of the prompt feedback from our customers.

So, I’d like to say a huge thank you to anyone who has taken the time to leave a review on the eSpares site. It helps us to make the site better every day. We really appreciate it.

You can, of course, leave a comment about this post. All reviews are welcome – positive and negative!

A New Day, A New Homepage

June 4, 2010 | eSpares Updates | No comments

If you’ve visited our homepage today you might have noticed that it’s been fully redesigned. We think there are loads of great additions, and there have also been a few tweaks and reshuffles too. Here’s just a few of the improvements we’ve made:

There’s now a rotating graphic with some rather dapper photos of spare parts and products we sell
Both the brand graphic section and the ‘Featured Spares’ section have been re-jigged
The Advice Centre now has a whole section on the page, all the better to Fix It Yourself with
There’s more of an emphasis on the social side of things. Latest posts from this very blog are now proudly displayed on the page, as well as nice big links to our Twitter, YouTube and Facebook profiles.

Now, if you want to get in touch, for any reason, there’s loads of easy ways to do it. We look forward to hearing from you soon, and do hope you like the new homepage.

Check it out!

Presenter For The Day – My Foray Into Being on Screen

June 2, 2010 | eSpares Updates | No comments

As you may have noticed if you’ve read previous posts, I have assumed a role as one of the presenters of our How-To videos. Now, this isn’t a natural progression for me, it had not been part of my plan to go all Dave Benson Phillips. In fact, just two months ago, I’d have described myself as a camera-shy fellow who’d never dream of doing anything like that. However, after some gentle, coaxing assurances from co-workers, I decided to give it a crack. Why not I thought, hopefully these videos will give people more confidence to fit spare parts themselves – they seem to have responded positively to Helen, Matt and the gang’s work.

Detergent Dispenser What You Need To Know

If You Give Rory Two Electric Screwdrivers

May 18, 2010 | eSpares Updates | No comments

He’ll reinact the bullet scene from The Matrix for you. It’s a fact.

Notice Anything New?

May 13, 2010 | eSpares Updates | 1 comment

If you’ve recently visited our website you may have noticed an update from this:

To this:

If you haven’t spotted it already, we’ve cleaned up the top navigation bar of our website. Through customer testing we realised that our top menu was too busy and the black blocky design took the eye away from the rest of the page. We hope that our new navigation bar is kinder to the eye and makes the search box more apparent.

Stay tuned…We’ve got more finely tuned changes up our sleeve.

Top Money Saving Reviews From The Last Week

May 12, 2010 | eSpares Updates | No comments

I love customer reviews. Being a bit thrifty myself, it makes me feel particularly good when a customer says that we helped save them money. Here are my two favourite money saving reviews from the last week:

“This is the second time I’ve used espares. V impressed, Product exactly as described, easily ordered and speedily delivered. Last time I became a domestic hero by mending our oven with an espares part saving us about £100 for calling out electrician!” Fridge Door Shelf, Anonymous from London.
“eSpares is awesome! I was quoted £58 from a repair man to fix the door catch. I just put in the make and model of my ancient drier (15 years old!!!) and I found this part. It arrived in just 3 days and it is the exact replacement- All for £6.00! In the old days before the economy went bad, I would have at best hired a man to do it, or at worst just bought a new machine. For just a few pounds, I was able to do it myself! If you do buy this part, you will need one of those strange little star head screwdrivers or maybe do it with a tiny straight one. You will have to prise the 2 sections of the door apart gently to enable you to get to the screws. But do it! eSpares will save you MONEY!!!” Tumble Dryer Door Catch, Singmoregirl from Northants.

Behind The Scenes of an Online Retailer

April 21, 2010 | eSpares Updates | No comments

I would hazard to bet that the majority of people who shop online don’t give a second thought to the experience except for when things go wrong. One of the many secrets to being a successful online retailer is to continually test the usability of your website with members of the public. Fundamentally, as an online retailer, what you want to test is that people who are unfamiliar with your brand have confidence buying from it. In order to achieve this your website has to run smoothly and look great.

This week we’re running another round of website testing to make sure that the buying process is completely straightforward. Here’s how it works:

We recruit members of the public to come into our office and complete a few shopping ‘tasks’ on the eSpares website. Ideally you want testers who represent your target audience. So, if for example, your target user-group is female and 30-45 years old, you should get testers who fall within that category.

The tricky thing for us is that our website defies traditional ‘target audience’ metrics. We’ve got just as many women buying from our site as men and they come from all age groups with varying degrees of online shopping experience. As you can imagine our testing group is very diverse. Once we’ve got all of our testers lined up we go ahead with a round of testing. Our Marketing Director, Matt Henton, runs the testing in our meeting room whilst members of our team look on remotely, as shown in the above photo.

Even though most of us at eSpares spend all day looking at our website, there are things that we miss. Some of the feedback that we’ve had from testers has actually been quite simple, easy to action, and has made our website considerably better. We try to do testing at least once every two months to make sure that we’re moving our site in the right direction.

It’s quite easy to assume that all the tweaks and changes you make to your website are perfect and just what the customer wants. Hubris is responsible for the downfall in most Greek tragedies; don’t let your ego lead your website, let your customers lead it. If you’ve got a new bit of functionality or a new design it’s much better to test a new bit of functionality first rather than launching it and having to make a lot of changes to a live site. It’s also quite easy to fall into the trap that if functionality is live on your site, and no one has complained about it, then it’s working to its full potential. This is why you should test.

When you work in an online marketplace, it’s quite easy to forget about the customer as your face-to-face contact is limited, we try our hardest not to let this happen. If you work for an online retailer we’d encourage you to test your website with members of the public as frequently as you can.

How To Make Sure It Fits – New Videos

April 19, 2010 | eSpares Updates | Vacuum Cleaner Repair, Help & Advice | No comments

We hold our hands up and say that carrying cleaning tools that are considered ‘generic’ or ‘universal’ has been a real struggle for us. We carry them for our customers who own vacuums where the genuine tools just aren’t made any more. On our landing pages we do our best to explain within the product description what you need to do to ensure that the tools will fit. Regardless we still encounter a higher than desirable return rate on these items with the reason being that the tool didn’t fit the cleaner.

As we all get more comfortable with online shopping it’s not always the case that the full product description is read prior to the item being purchased. I’m guilty of this too and currently own a beautiful, but very oversized, laundry basket. After all if the tool looks identical to the one that you need that’s basically all you need to know, right?

In order to combat this problem we’re trying a different approach and using videos to convey the fitting information. Here are our two latest videos that we’ve shot, we’re hoping that they’ll decrease our returns rate for the products they feature and increase customer satisfaction.

This video is featured against our universal 30-37mm vacuum floor tool.

This video is featured against our universal 32mm dusting brush.

As a retailer you don’t want people to return products to you, generally it means that you’re doing something wrong. Even worse is when a customer orders a product, is unhappy with it, but doesn’t bother to let you know or return it. We’ll be keeping a watchful eye on the conversion of these products, their returns rate and customer reviews now that the videos have been added.

A Lightbulb Moment – New Video

April 6, 2010 | eSpares Updates | Kitchen Appliances Repair, Help & Advice | No comments

As a retailer one of our business objectives is to increase customer satisfaction by ensuring that you get the right product every time. In the world of spare parts we acknowledge that it can be a bit confusing to find the correct part the first time around.

Oven light bulbs are an area where we knew that we needed to improve. Oven lamps had a high return rate in addition to customer reviews that shared the sentiment the bulb didn’t fit but wasn’t worth the hassle to return. We weren’t happy about this; it reflects a very poor customer experience. In response we shot this short and simple video to ensure that our customers get the right oven bulb the first time around:

Our objective for this video is to help reduce our returns rate for cooker light bulbs and increase our customer happiness.We’ll be watching our customer reviews and returns rates to make sure that we’ve achieved our goal.