Leader Spotlight: Building trust through user-generated content, with Alicia Dixon
Alicia Dixon is Director of Product Management, with a recent focus on ecommerce and consumer-facing product strategy. She has served in various product leadership roles at Hilton Worldwide, Apartment List, and Walmart. Alicia began her career in corporate retail, working in design and marketing roles at brands like Toys”R”Us, Nike, and Fruit of the Loom before transitioning to brand and program management at Dell. After completing an MBA, Alicia joined Roadnet Technologies (formerly UPS Logistics Technologies) as a product manager on the mobile platform. From there, she transitioned to a similar role at Sheridan, one of the largest print and publishing service providers in the industry.
In our conversation, Alicia talks about building trust through user-generated content, including how reviews, ratings, and other forms of social proof help shoppers make confident purchasing decisions. She discusses her approach to creating and measuring successful UGC programs, as well as the evolving role of authenticity in ecommerce.
Designing UGC for trust and decision-making
You have deep experience in user-generated content, which can be very useful for enhancing trust or building engagement, but at scale it could overwhelm users. How do you decide what content to share, when to share it, with whom, and how does that improve decision-making?
Determining what UGC to show depends on where the consumer is in the purchasing cycle. On a search results screen, people want to know the item’s star rating and how many reviews it has. Something with five reviews is going to be viewed differently than something with 5,000 reviews. Showing that information up front can help drive someone to click to the next step.
If they’re on the cart page, for example, they’ve already made a decision. They don’t need to read reviews. The place where you show the most detail is on the product details page, where you would display the actual content of the reviews. You would have what we call pills, where you’ve sifted through the reviews and surfaced highlighted comments that come up over and over again. You’d probably want an AI summary of what people most often say, and you’d want to show both positive and negative sentiment. That’s also where you want photos.
How do you think about UGC as a dynamic product surface that actively shapes the customer journey?
User-generated content is based on social proof. Consumers are not looking at the retailer to give them a signal — they’re looking at peers and other shoppers. They want to know what others thought and what their experiences were.
It’s important to make sure there’s transparency and that shoppers believe that the reviews are from real people who actually purchased the product. You can’t have too many incentivized reviews, where someone was paid or given free product in exchange for a review. Anytime you use those carrots to draw people in, it can erode trust. It’s important to make sure there’s enough social proof and enough cues so that shoppers feel they can trust the people leaving reviews.
When someone has an average experience, they’re often not going to leave a review. The person who’s going to leave one is somebody who says, “These knives don’t cut anything,” or, “These are the best knives I’ve ever had.” You end up with either really high or really low ratings. The people who had an average experience are the customers you have to pull in and ask to post content.
If one person has a negative experience, it’s more likely that multiple people had negative experiences. If you have 100 negative reviews and three great ones, people aren’t going to believe the positive reviews. What you’re looking for is something closer to a normal curve.
Prompting for reviews at the right time
What about metrics — how do you measure whether UGC is truly transforming the user experience rather than just increasing engagement?
When I was driving UGC, the main thing I looked at was building not just a collection of reviews but what I would call a content loop. You can offer a prompt to ask for reviews, collect reviews, submit reviews, and then engage with those reviews. Then it goes back to asking for reviews again. The goal is to create a virtuous cycle.
You need to measure two sides: submission rates and engagement metrics. You also need to understand how many reviews shoppers need to read in order to make a good decision. That becomes your benchmark for the minimum number of reviews you need per item. Then, you have to know what a good submission rate looks like relative to your conversion rates. Once you’ve established that benchmark, you can measure whether reviews are helping lift conversions, increase add-to-cart rates, or reduce returns.
These are hard things to measure. You have to instrument from the beginning and find ways to isolate reviews from other parts of the shopping journey. Did the consumer look at price, shipping time, or reviews? Having a way to test and determine which component is actually driving change is difficult.
When you create that flywheel to convert passive consumers into active contributors, what are the things you try to watch for — things that might break it or cause it to slow down?
If you don’t solicit reviews at the right time, it changes the responses you get. We found it was optimal to ask for a review seven days after a product was received because that’s when most people have actually used it. But a TV might require three to six months before the purchaser can give an objective review, while a T-shirt can usually be reviewed after one wear.
We also experimented with different solicitation methods. 10 years ago, people mostly sent emails. So, we started using push notifications, advertising banners, and reminders in purchase history pages. Asking for a review while someone is already taking another action, like making another purchase or browsing the site, can be very effective. They’re more likely to give a quick thought.
Another important factor is making reviews easier to submit. Reviews used to be a large empty text box. We started offering things like star ratings and selectable keywords. We can generate a draft review, and the user can click a button that says, “I agree with this.” That way, they don’t have the mental load of seeing an empty text box and thinking, “I don’t want to fill this out.”
How does UGC come into play differently for higher and lower-consideration purchases?
Back to the knives example, say you’re buying some, and you’re not a serious home cook. You might see a four-star rating at the right price and buy immediately. But if you’re taking cooking classes and trying to become a chef, you’re going to read the reviews. You’ll want details about sharpness, food preparation, maintenance, and long-term use. When it’s a higher-risk, higher-consideration purchase, you’re more likely to lean on reviews.
The delicate balance of incentivized reviews
How do you solve the cold start problem for new product categories where the user-generated content doesn’t yet exist and you’re starting from scratch?
It’s a really delicate balance with incentivized reviews. More often than not, you’re going to have to give the product away and ask for an honest review. You have to be very precise with your language to make it clear that you’re asking for an objective review, not a positive one. The FTC watches this closely because if you’re soliciting only positive reviews, you’re influencing the outcome. You want enough reviews to provide trust signals, but not so many incentivized reviews that shoppers stop believing them.
You might launch with 25 incentivized reviews, but immediately start soliciting more reviews from regular purchasers. You can also encourage participation through recognition rather than incentives. Maybe you notify people when their review helps another shopper. Maybe you award badges when contributors reach milestones. People like to feel they’re making a difference and working toward something.
Leveraging incentivized reviews and providing trust signals to the consumer is a delicate balance. If you have two five-star reviews, no one’s going to trust that. At the same time, if you have a large number of incentivized reviews but no regular, non-incentivized reviews, shoppers won’t trust that either.
How does personalization play into UGC? Do you find that too much personalization can start to feel opaque or reduce trust?
I don’t know that personalization reduces trust. I think it’s more that a reduction in authenticity can reduce trust in things like AI. There are concerns about bot attacks and AI-generated reviews. After a while, they all start sounding the same. We had situations where reviews were submitted as slight variations of one another, and it was obvious they weren’t authentic. We had to build controls to determine where reviews came from, when they were written, and whether patterns suggested fraud. For example, one change we made was requiring users to be logged in to an account before they could submit reviews.
What creative or unique ways have you found to build a contributor community and accelerate your flywheel?
We gave top contributor badges to people who read or wrote the most reviews. But we also introduced category expertise badges, such as electronics expert or cooking expert. If someone is a cooking expert, you may place more weight on their cooking-related reviews than their apparel reviews. These designations helped contributors feel recognized and encouraged them to continue participating. We vetted them on both purchase history and review activity.
Influencers and the role of consumer confidence
What do you see for the future of user-generated content? Where is it going, in your opinion?
UGC is definitely moving away from written content on retailer websites. Social commerce, social content, and social media are becoming increasingly important. Retailers are partnering with social platforms and influencers because content is moving to TikTok, Instagram, and other channels. Retailers want to bring shoppers from that content directly into purchasing experiences.
The question becomes: who are the influencers that can provide objective commentary while also attracting an audience? And a lot of times, brands end up having some type of compensation for those influencers because of what their public reviews are worth.
When you think about ‘transformative customer experiences,’ what actually changes for the user when UGC is done well?
The biggest thing is confidence. UGC helps customers feel they’re purchasing the right thing. It can reduce return rates because consumers have more information before they buy. Beyond reviews, things like virtual fit tools and photos from real users help shoppers understand what a product will actually look like and feel like. The goal is to make customers feel closer to the experience they’d have in a physical store. UGC helps people become more comfortable making purchases they have to trust before they can actually see or touch the product.
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