Review policy is also used for CRM! Results of the review policy started with the encouragement of customers.

With the concept of "Special Moments in Kamakura," KEY MEMORY designs and sells items in Kamakura that allow people to relax in their daily lives, drawing inspiration from loungewear and workplace uniforms of all kinds. In addition to its Kamakura store, the company currently offers its original products through a wide range of sales channels, including an online store and pop-up shops.In this interview, we spoke with 鈴木様, the representative of KEY MEMORY, to learn about how they utilize reviews. We delved into their strategies for leveraging reviews—not just displaying them, but using them extensively across everything from product development to CRM.

Why did you start considering the implementation of a review tool?

We recognized that implementing a review tool was a good idea, as we saw that virtually every other apparel brand’s online store had one. We also knew it was important from a Google SEO perspective and felt we would eventually need to do it. However, we hadn’t made concrete plans because we were worried about things like, “What if we don’t get any reviews at all?” The turning point came from the results of a customer survey we conducted via LINE.In response to the survey question “Requests for the online store,” a surprising 15% of all respondents requested “We want reviews.” Encouraged by this customer feedback, we began exploring the implementation of a review tool.

Why did you choose U-KOMI out of all the review tools available?

The biggest deciding factor was that U-KOMI was recommended by a shop that had been using the same cart system as us and with whom we had a relationship. Of course, we did compare it with other tools. However, U-KOMI had many advantages in terms of both functionality and cost, so we decided to implement it.

Specifically, which features influenced your decision to adopt U-KOMI?

Flexible Design

The biggest factor was design flexibility. Since we deal in apparel, we wanted to pay special attention to the design of the reviews. Most other tools required us to choose a design from a set of templates, but none of them matched the atmosphere of our online store. We’re grateful to U-KOMI for accommodating our design needs so flexibly.

Automatic point issuance to reviewers via shopping cart integration

The integration with our cart system was also very appealing.We can automatically send a request email for a review after a purchase is completed, and we can also automatically award points to those who submit a review. The automatic point awarding has been particularly helpful; since reviewers often return to the online store to use the points they’ve earned, we believe it contributes to our CRM efforts as well. If we were to handle this manually, awarding points would be quite labor-intensive, so I believe we’ve been able to achieve this thanks to U-KOMI.

What results have you seen since implementing U-KOMI?

Successfully collected 1,700 reviews in 3 months

I was surprised by how many reviews we gathered—far more than I had imagined. It was truly wonderful that we were able to collect as many as 1,700 reviews within just three months of implementation. It’s also been helpful for product planning. Previously, we could only gather customer feedback at our physical stores, so it’s been a great help to be able to collect feedback from customers using our online store. We’ve now established a system where we develop new products based on both the feedback gathered through in-store interactions and the feedback collected from reviews.

Visualizing Online Customer Feedback

We also believe that the reviews posted by customers are encouraging other customers to make purchases. For example, we’ve seen reviews like, “I was concerned about the XX part, but after reading other people’s reviews, I decided it didn’t seem like a problem, so I bought it.” Since we’ve seen reviews where customers mention they made a purchase based on others’ feedback, we believe this is contributing to improving our online store’s conversion rate.Since our apparel is unisex, customers may feel anxious about sizing and comfort when purchasing online, but we believe the reviews posted so far are helping to alleviate those concerns.

What are your plans for utilizing reviews and the future outlook for the business?

Currently, we’re looking to boost the repeat purchase rate for our online store, so we plan to implement strategies that leverage reviews to achieve that. At present, I believe our requests for review submissions are contributing to our retention efforts. By implementing initiatives based on reviews and surveys that help customers remember us, I believe we can further utilize reviews not only to improve conversion rates (CVR) and product planning but also in our CRM efforts.

Finally, do you have any requests for U-KOMI?

Actually, we’re currently using a different tool to post short videos on Instagram, but I think it would be convenient to consolidate those functions into U-KOMI, which already manages UGC centered around reviews. Also, since most user communication takes place via LINE, I believe it would be even more effective if review requests could be integrated with LINE.