Crate&Barrel launches customer reviews

I received an email today from Crate&Barrel announcing that they've launched customer reviews, along with a contest for those who submit them. I heart Crate&Barrel, and I was curious about their process, so I went ahead and reviewed my coffee maker (those of you who know me well know that coffee is near and dear to my heart).

Here are my thoughts:

First of all, good for you Crate&Barrel. Every retailer should host customer reviews. And nice job of tying the launch in with a contest to seed your efforts.


Also, good job on the process. It's easy to navigate and allows people to participate at the level they desire. They can simply rate a product or they can provide details including the type of home they live in and their style. If Crate&Barrel is really smart, they'll use this collective data one day to help guide purchases, for example, "67% of customers who live in a town home in Seattle have this type of coffee maker."



Also good ... integration with other types of social media. For example. You can easily post to Facebook. But not so good job on how this showed up on my Facebook page -- instead of showing the review or even "Laura reviewed the Cuisinart Coffee Maker at Crate&Barrel," it just provided basic text about the site and a link to the coffee maker itself. From a user experience perspective that's a fail. Maybe you can fix that?



But overall, I'm happy to see another retailer giving their customers a voice on their site. It makes me like Crate&Barrel even more.