Delivering on trust: inside AO’s journey to one million reviews

Delivering care straight to the doorstep

For John Roberts, CEO of online electronics retailer AO, growing a massive online business doesn't mean losing your heart. In a digital-first world, AO runs on a simple but powerful belief: nobody cares about your customer like you do. To show everyone that this care is real, AO uses Trustpilot as both an everyday tool and a source of strategic insights. Using Trustpilot to collect and respond to reviews gives AO a completely honest look at their service.

When life's daily cycles break down

When a major home appliance breaks, it's an immediate headache for a family. Customers dealing with a broken machine are stressed - they don't want to talk to robots or hear an agent read from an impersonal script. Standard things, like arriving on time with a working tracking link, are just the basic "table stakes" that the customer expects. The real challenge for AO as they grew to a massive scale was making sure they could still show humanity and understanding every single time.

The power of 4.9: how every review drives improvement

The true power of building trust is about turning customer feedback into actual operational changes. The brand has automated its review invitations, gathering feedback throughout the customer journey. This has created a representative and actionable view of customer experiences, providing the richer and more granular insights which power sustained, long-term improvement. 

To harness these insights, AO set up a dedicated internal group called Team 4.9 to manually read every single review that is not five stars. The team traces problems back through the company, even as far as the product manufacturer, to prevent issues from happening again. In fact, there have been occasions where customer feedback has been the first time AO has heard about an issue, giving them improvement opportunities that would have otherwise been invisible.