Groupon taps Trustpilot VoC to drive new service standards

When it comes to upping your CX game, the best place to start is with an understand of how you’re currently performing. It’s just one reason why Voice of the Customer (VoC) is so important to CX – and with customers able to share their feedback with the world through online reviews, getting to grips with feedback and sentiment is essential. After all, a low score can affect both public perception and internal engagement within a company.

For Groupon, the online marketplace for discount experiences, listening to customers and, crucially, acting on their feedback has helped it transform a one-star TrustScore on Trustpilot into four-stars. Since partnering with Trustpilot in 2019, Groupon has improved both its customer experience and brand reputation, for example, by making changes to its refund policy and complaint handling procedures.

But the transformation wasn’t solely due to service improvements. Trustpilot and Groupon also worked together to prompt customers to share feedback across their entire journey by embedding review options at key touchpoints. Not only did this prevent the negative bias that online reviews often attract, but it broadened the customer personas that were likely to leave a review.

Speaking to CX Network, Groupon’s VP of global operations Adam Lindsey, and Trustpilot’s chief customer officer Alicia Skubick (both pictured below), talk about the strategic advantage artificial intelligence (AI) can bring to VoC, why organizations are ditching the term “customer centric” for customer obsessed and how to ensure reviews are genuine.

CX Network: Customer feedback is becoming more difficult to capture – unless something goes wrong and customers want to share their negative experiences. How does Groupon engage and motivate customers to share the good and the bad?

Adam Lindsey: Customer satisfaction is an entire universe of complexity, with countless ways to gather customer feedback and equally intricate methods to categorize, analyze and present the data.

One of the major challenges we faced at Groupon was the disconnect between our external TrustScore and our internal satisfaction metrics. As a business, we knew the vast majority of customers had a great experience, yet few people take the time to write, “I had a seamless experience” on review platforms.

To truly understand the realities of customer experience, it's essential to rely on a diverse range of inputs.

Internal satisfaction metrics, such as surveys sent after interactions with customer service or upon voucher redemption, must be considered alongside external feedback from platforms like Trustpilot.

Customer feedback is both a science and an art – there’s no such thing as too much data. The more insights gathered from diverse sources, the stronger and more actionable the feedback becomes.

CX Network: What do you believe is the biggest challenge facing VoC at present?

Adam Lindsey: AI is both a blessing and a curse for VoC. At Groupon, we see firsthand how anyone can feed vast amounts of data into AI models at little to no cost, generating polished and well-written outputs.

The challenge, however, is that these outputs often lack specificity – they’re too generic, disconnected from the tools, processes and policies that shape the customer experience, and ultimately not actionable.

AI models frequently produce broad statements like “the agent was not empathetic enough” or “the customer experienced an issue at checkout.” But what exactly was the issue? At what stage did it occur? What was the customer’s intent? These crucial details often get lost.

AI is a powerful tool, but only when applied with the right context, a deep understanding of the ecosystem it’s analyzing and a clear focus on actionable insights.

Alicia Skubick: AI is reshaping the business landscape, especially from the customer service and VoC perspective. VoC leaders have the challenge of managing vast numbers of customer interactions and data points, and an ongoing challenge is how to surface these sufficiently to make key strategic decisions and in a timely manner.

This is where AI can provide a strategic advantage, but businesses need to balance automation with human interaction especially while interpreting and analyzing sentiment and customer feedback.

Customer experience leaders can harness the power of AI to help uncover what’s important to their customers, get ahead and stay ahead in their market and respond more efficiently, all while building deeper trust between their brand and their consumers.

We work with businesses to make this possible in several ways. One example is understanding customer feedback and obtaining deeper insights to help you improve your brand. This is often time consuming and difficult to surface the right insights which is where the balance of AI and human interaction comes into play. Using Google’s generative AI, our review spotlight feature brings millions of data points together, delivering actionable insights from reviews.

Another example is businesses can now respond to even more customer reviews - while maintaining their brand integrity – with AI assisted review responses. This suggests and auto-populates responses to reviews that incorporate brand tone of voice and typical patterns for resolving issues or thanking customers. Of course, we still need customer experience teams to review and approve the copy before publishing the response. We’ve seen this feature lower response times by 30 percent on average.

CX Network: What are some of the measures that you take to ensure reviews are genuine and therefore will build and maintain trust among the consumers that use Trustpilot?

Alicia Skubick: We go to great lengths to safeguard our platform, and have a range of techniques from technology, community and people to protect Trustpilot and combat fake reviews.

Every single review that is submitted to us is run through specialist detection technology which uses a combination of machine learning, AI and data analysis to look at patterns associated with how it ends up on the platform and its relationship with other reviews and reviewers.

There are hundreds of data points included in this analysis, and we also have teams of content integrity and fraud investigation specialists who work in tandem with our automated systems.

If we remove a significant number of fake reviews from a business profile, we can display what we call a consumer warning – a banner that tells anyone looking at the company what we’ve done. It’s vital we give consumers as much information as possible.

Lastly, anyone – consumers and businesses – can also flag or report a review for a number of different reasons, including from not being based on a genuine experience or containing personal information or promotional content. Once that has happened we then decide whether we keep the review on our platform. We also operate what’s known as a whistleblower function where anyone can report suspicious activity on our platform and we’ll investigate.

CX Network: Talk about being “customer centric” is starting to evolve into talk about being “customer obsessed”. How can a business elevate their approach to business in line with the language?

Adam Lindsey: Every company claims to be customer-centric. Every CEO insists the customer comes first, and everyone in the customer experience space strives to deliver best-in-class experiences.

The real challenge lies in defining what it truly means to be customer-obsessed and ensuring the entire business is aligned with that vision.

At Groupon, we know that customer experience goes far beyond customer service, yet it's often mistaken as the same thing. In reality, customer service is just one piece of the puzzle. In an ideal world, customers wouldn’t need to contact support at all because every interaction would be seamless. Achieving this requires collaboration across every function of the business.

This is where Trustpilot plays a key role, offering an external and valuable source of insight to pinpoint customer pain points, measure their frequency, and assess their impact.

At Groupon, we recognize that true customer obsession means aligning the entire company around a shared vision.

When customer experience is seen as solely the responsibility of customer service – a common pitfall in any industry – the experience will always fall short of its full potential.

Alicia Skubick: Today’s competitive landscape makes it harder for businesses to stand out from the competition, and customer experience is rapidly becoming a high-impact differentiator.

To truly stand out, businesses must move from being purely customer centric, to being customer obsessed. The main difference is the intensity of focus on the customers’ needs and improving their experience.  It’s a mindset shift; a commitment to prioritizing customers above all else. 

Customer-centricity is a great tool to ensure a business runs successfully, but customer obsession is what makes it future-proof.

Some ways a business can evolve to be customer obsessed are by collecting customer feedback, such as reviews, to understand the needs, priorities and expectations of customers. The best businesses not only collect reviews but also harness the insights to make business decisions. They share the insights, trending topics, sentiment and competitor benchmarking across all departments and implement change based on this feedback.

It means businesses are continuingly delivering better customer service and improving the customer journey by proactively getting insights from the end customer.

CX Network: What do you believe will be the key customer behaviour trends for CX practitioners to be mindful of in 2025?

Adam Lindsey: AI has been a major focus for the past two years – and will likely remain so for many more. At Groupon, we see AI not just as a trend, but as an essential, evolving tool for enhancing CX.

While AI is valuable for summarizing verbatim data, assisting with analytical planning, and supporting design, it still relies on human judgment and the expertise of those who understand the nuances of customer experience.

It’s critical to recognize that AI is here to stay. For many CX practitioners, it’s a tool that needs to be adopted and integrated into everyday operations. The challenge for many is in how to leverage AI effectively while continuing to preserve the human aspects of CX.

As we've mentioned, customer experience is both a science and an art, and it's crucial not to overlook the art. Not every decision can be quantified, refined or fully optimized by AI – some require intuition and subjective insight. As AI continues to evolve, the creative and human aspects of CX become even more essential.

In theory, AI can do everything; in reality, its real value lies in how effectively it is applied to drive meaningful, sustainable change.

Alicia Skubick: I think this year there will be a real focus from customers on prioritizing security and ensuring their data are protected while balancing the need for personalization. As well as being compliant with legislation, companies need to be transparent about data protection measures with customers.

This is an area where a business can quickly lose consumer trust, so it’s important to have open, honest, proactive communications on this.

With the normalization of AI in day-to-day business functions, companies must also be mindful not to forget the power of the human touch. Instead of just being able to chat to bots online, consumers still want the option to have human interaction with a business.

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