Facebook is restricting sellers who aren’t delivering a good customer experience to users.
Facebook generates a score from 0 to 5 based on different information. The most prominent way data is collected is through post-purchase surveys sent to users who’ve purchased items from Facebook ads.
Users are surveyed based on whether they felt the product quality met their expectations, shipping was timely, and more. But unlike other selling platforms where users are used to rating sellers, Customer Feedback Score is only visible to users who manage the brand.
Facebook isn’t messing around with these scores. A score below 2 will penalize the reach of your Page. Even more costly, there will be a delivery penalty applied to ads meaning ads will be more expensive and reach fewer users. Ad costs are already rising due to increased competition so a penalty like this would have dire consequences to ROI.
If reduced delivery and increased ad costs aren’t tough enough consequences to change your ways, a score of 1 or below is a kiss of death. Scores below this threshold lands an immediate ban to running ads.
The Customer Feedback Score dashboard makes no secret that the survey heavily relies on survey questions about Product Quality, Shipping Speed, and Customer Service.
For Product Quality scores, authenticity is the name of the game. Brands need to be as detailed about their products on their website, from sizing, dimensions, materials, or benefits. Most brands with good relationships with their suppliers should be able to have accurate information.
For Shipping Speed, sellers don’t necessarily need to shipping at the speed of Amazon Prime but rather be transparent about expected delivery times. Seller who provide proper shipping notifications should have no issues here. However, it’s possible to set your typical delivery speed in the Customer Feedback Score dashboard. This allows for Facebook to properly deploy these surveys to users so that a seller with typical 3 week delivery isn’t being penalized when a user takes a survey before the product is delivered. You can set that speed in increments of weeks up to eight weeks and have control over setting delivery speed by country or region.
For Customer Service, we’ve seen most of the miscellaneous feedback here be about return policies or customer response times. Being transparent with customers who are reaching out about when they can expect a response goes a long way for customers to feel like they will be addressed and not ignored.
If your Page's score drops to 2 or below, your Page will be penalized. Pages with a score between 2 and 1 will see a delivery penalty applied to its ads, meaning they will reach fewer people for the same budget. If your Page’s score drops to 1 or below, it will automatically be disabled from running ads.
While it may seem scary to have your fate in the hands of user responses, most ecommerce brands should be operating with few issues here and no penalties. However, these policies seem aimed at removing dropshipping schemes where sellers peddled low-quality products that took too long to finally be delivered. Many of these sellers offered no returns and because the business was not fully staffed, customer service was poorer than most ecommerce brands.
Overall, Facebook wants users to have faith in the products promoted on its platform. Most brands are already conscious of providing great customer experiences and reacting to customer feedback.
If you’ve ever bought a bad product on Facebook, then you can understand the Social Value in making sure others don’t.
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