TurnTo Networks 
When the digital boom swept across the retail industry, content became a core element of influence for retail brands and eCommerce companies in serving the needs of their online customers. As a result, many companies began experimenting with a string of different methods and platforms to deliver an engaging experience across web and store interfaces. TurnTo Networks, a New York-based provider of customer content solutions has upped the ante for retail brands by aiding its clients in leveraging customer-generated content (CGC) to influence shoppers’ decisions. The idea of enabling customers to help one another was the credo behind the inception of TurnTo and its fervor to develop best-in-class products.
“The concept of gathering CGC in the form of Ratings & Reviews has its roots with Amazon, who invented the first model for Ratings & Reviews. TurnTo entered the scene with a mission of disrupting the space through innovation and extending the product offering through other forms of CGC collection,” says George Eberstadt, Founder & CEO, TurnTo Networks. “We were the pioneers in the Community Q&A space and have since evolved our offering to include Visual Reviews and Checkout Comments as a way to engage shoppers with products in a different way. So, while Ratings & Reviews is at the core, TurnTo focuses on delivering a suite of products that together give our retailers an edge above the rest.”
The team at TurnTo is a diverse mix of experts with experience in product engineering, social technologies, SaaS business support and marketing, who collectively contribute to the company’s continued success within the retail industry.
TurnTo’s Ratings & Reviews product is equipped with seamless customer profile integration and easy-to-use analytics features which help address customer queries on products and services. Their Community Q&A solution was born out of the need to understand and accelerate the response to customers’ questions. Ultimately this inspired the team at TurnTo to pioneer automated language processing capabilities, and the solution promises to deliver on accuracy, quick publication and reduction in workload. Visual Reviews enabled smart-phone equipped customers to respond to reviews by snapping a picture rather than typing a text review. “Shoppers of today are immersed with visuals as part of the buying experience, from product pictures and graphics onsite to social channels and pinboards,” explains Eberstadt. “What Visual Reviews allows for is an opportunity for the shopper to share real, personal photos of their purchase to help inform others.” Retailers are always looking at ways to incorporate more visuals into their product pages, Visual Reviews provide a source in which to harvest this content and build a more robust online experience.
TurnTo’s offerings have been widely deployed by retail customers of varying sizes across multiple categories to facilitate engagement across their customer communities. Sur La Table, a leading gourmet kitchen retailer decided to use TurnTo’s suite of offerings to enable social interactions among their online shoppers while instilling a sense of community with cooking enthusiasts and chefs. The retailer looked to TurnTo and their full suite of product solutions as a solution to their needs, and after on-boarding was able to solicit responses from a broader segment of customers, tripling the number of reviews captured across their catalog.
After disrupting the retail industry with their unique suite of innovative products, there is more in store for TurnTo. “For the future you can expect to see a continued focus on delivering solutions that meet our customers ever-changing needs and an insatiable appetite for bringing innovation to the market,” says Eberstadt.
