Compass Coffee gets 70.5% more customer reviews per quarter with Klaviyo reviews

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Compass Coffee started in 2014 with a simple mission: to point coffee lovers in the right direction at the start of each day with a cup of “real good coffee.” Today, the brand has blossomed into a network of 17 DC-area coffee shops, serving locally roasted beans.

In 2020, Compass launched an additional subscription-focused ecommerce operation to weather early COVID. That side of the business continues to grow today, with Klaviyo assisting at every stage of the funnel—including post-purchase.

Learn why Compass Coffee switched to Klaviyo reviews

Challenge

Compass Coffee’s reviews solution cost an arm and a leg, and that wasn’t even the worst thing about it. The biggest problem was inflexibility.

Compass wanted reviews that included a picture of “your coffee in your kitchen,” as CMO Joel Shetterly puts it—and it was hard to effectively incentivize photo submissions.

When customers left reviews, Compass could only reward them with confusing, hard-to-redeem points, rather than a straightforward discount code.

The automated review request email also went out a fixed number of days after an order was placed—there was no way to customize the experience for delayed or lost orders.

“You’d get the out-of-the-box review request and referral flows, but you couldn’t set all the rules and filters and triggers that you can with Klaviyo,” Shetterly says.

You’d get the out-of-the-box review request and referral flows, but you couldn’t set all the automation rules and filters and triggers that you can with Klaviyo.

Solution

Compass Coffee already used Klaviyo for email and SMS, and when Shetterly heard about Klaviyo reviews, he was immediately sold. It was an opportunity to consolidate 3 marketing channels in one platform—plus, the Klaviyo add-on cost substantially less.

After about a week of set-up, Klaviyo reviews was live on the Compass Coffee site.

Strategy

Compass Coffee’s review request flow immediately worked better. In Klaviyo, they can now customize the trigger for their review request flow, so it only goes out after an order is delivered.

They can also reward reviewers with auto-generated Shopify discount codes, rather than points.

Best of all, customers only receive a discount code if their review includes a photo.

Thanks to Klaviyo reviews’ out-of-the-box “review has media” event, Compass was able to set up a conditional split: If a review has a photo, the reviewer gets a 15% discount on their next order; if it doesn’t, they simply get a thank-you email and a reminder to leave a photo next time.

In Q1 2023, their first quarter with Klaviyo, Compass saw a 3.7x QoQ jump in customer photos submitted—and a 70.5% jump in total reviews submitted.

“Klaviyo wins on the customizability of the review collection correspondence,” says Shetterly. “The rate of review collection is completely solved; the rate of photo collection is completely solved.”

Klaviyo wins on the customizability of the review collection correspondence. The rate of review collection is completely solved; the rate of photo collection is completely solved.