Customer reviews can be termed as the ‘word-of-mouth publicity’ of the digital age. Earlier, when the internet was not in wide use, people used to rely on the recommendations of their acquaintances to make a buying decision. People used to share with others their experiences regarding various products and services.
But in today’s time, when people don’t miss checking anything online, customer reviews or client reviews have taken the place of personal suggestions from friends and relatives. Reviews posted online act as ‘words of appreciation’ from people who have already used a particular product or service.
Thus, those who are confused about whether or not to buy a particular product or service can refer to reviews posted by existing and former customers online. In this age of social media, everyone is vocal about different topics that affect their lives. People share opinions about political conditions, global issues, national policies, weather, society, and much more.
Similarly, they also share their opinions about the products and services they use. They want to express their feelings related to the use of merchandise and services they have purchased. People write reviews on different platforms whether they are satisfied or unsatisfied.
However, the chances of an unsatisfied customer writing reviews are always more than the chances of a satisfied customer writing reviews. When people are unhappy with their purchases, they tend to share details about the same with others to get some instant emotional relief. Many people post reviews for businesses that disappoint them in order to beware others of products and services that are below the accepted or expected standards.
Why Customer Reviews are Important?
Customers are the lifeline of a business firm, and so, every entrepreneur must keep them happy. The existing customers of your business influence the buying decisions of prospective customers through their offline and online conversations. Customers are one of those prominent factors that can make or mar a business. The reason behind the same is that they talk about your business with people they know.
But you should not treat your customers well just because you want them to praise your business, product offerings, or services. You should be sincerely devoted to making your customers satisfied. You can earn genuine and desired reviews only when you focus on ensuring customer satisfaction and providing good customer support.
Before you try to understand how to get more online reviews for your business, you should try to realize that an entrepreneur should always be willing to learn about the true experiences of their customers. The best way to learn about how your customers feel about your business, products, services, and customer service is to get customer reviews.
Many business firms implement the shady technique of posting fake positive reviews on Google, customer review sites, and social media channels. Sooner or later, their technique gets exposed, as a lot of customers read the online reviews thoroughly. On top of it, customers have now become aware of digital marketing trends.
So, whenever they check the reputation of any business firm online, they practice due diligence. Customers read between the lines, and so, they can distinguish between genuine and fake reviews. Business firms spend money on online review management and reputation management without thinking about the long-term outcome.
Even if you manage to increase your sales through fake reviews, you cannot sustain the increased sales for long. Over time, you will find it tough to balance genuine positive and negative reviews with fake positive reviews. Instead of spending money on getting fake reviews, you should spend money on improving your products, services, and customer support.
You can spend millions on advertisements and promotions, but if your product or service is not up-to-the-mark, existing your customers will stop buying from you. The positive customer reviews posted for your business on various platforms will also not be able to change their minds.
Moreover, they will write reviews on Google, customer review websites, and social media platforms. As a result, you will find it hard to attract new customers. Most prospective customers will make up their minds about not dealing with your business on the basis of the reviews available online.
Therefore, the key or the right path to getting online reviews for your business is to provide the best quality products and services. You should understand that getting customer reviews or client reviews doesn’t require manipulation or unethical practices. You only need to take care of the requirements of your customers in the best possible manner.
Customer reviews are important from various viewpoints. When the name of your business enterprise or website is mentioned in reviews on different platforms, it gets a boost in terms of SEO, i.e., search engine optimization. Your website will get a better ranking on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) for the branded search terms related to your business and website.
Essentials to Get More Customer Reviews
Positive customer reviews create a long-lasting impression for your business. Every new customer who searches about your products or services before buying them reads those reviews. They start trusting your business and product offerings.
Customer reviews are important for all business firms irrespective of their size, type, industry, or geographical location. Whether it’s eating at a restaurant, booking a hotel room, buying an electrical appliance, or registering on a dating platform, customers read reviews of the various options available to them before picking the most suitable option.
Therefore, business enterprises make efforts to get as many client reviews or customer reviews as possible. They know that reviews of existing customers or clients are more effective than expensive promotion campaigns. Every business firm gets a few reviews, especially on Google, without making extensive efforts to gain reviews.
But in order to get more customer reviews, i.e., the maximum possible customer reviews, you should take care of some essential points mentioned below. Without taking care of these points, the efforts you invest in getting online reviews will go in vain.
Create Profiles on Different Customer Review Sites
When people hear terms like ‘customer reviews’ and ‘online reviews’, the first picture that comes to their mind is of Google. Reviews posted on ‘Google My Business’ are considered to be extremely reliable. Google My Business is a platform that allows business firms to create a profile or account. Customers find it convenient to write reviews on Google My Business.
However, you cannot ignore the fact that there are multiple platforms on which customers can post reviews. Trustpilot, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Angie’s List, Yellow Pages, Trusted Shops, and Foursquare are some of the top websites that allow customers to post online reviews.
Apart from the above-mentioned sites, social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram also serve as platforms where customers write reviews. People also write reviews on the particular e-commerce site from where they made their purchases, for example, Amazon and Flipkart.
If you want to get online reviews for your business, you should have profiles on multiple platforms. You need to determine which are the websites and social media channels on which your customers would prefer posting reviews. Some websites may not be suitable for your business, for example, TripAdvisor is not suitable for a dental clinic.
Once you make a list of the platforms on which you have a chance to get reviews, you should create an account on all of them. It’s worth mentioning here that even if you don’t have an account on a particular review website, customers will still be able to write a review.
But the presence of your profile indicates that you are serious about learning how your customers feel regarding your products and services. It shows that you are proactive, a quality many customers admire. The account of your business on any review website is a signal that you are open to listening to what customers have to say.
Check All Your Profiles on Review Sites Regularly
Merely creating an account on Google My Business and other customer review websites as well as social media channels is not enough. You need to check all those platforms where you have created a profile regularly. You should monitor the activities happening on those platforms to find out what kinds of reviews your business is getting.
Reply to All the Positive and Negative Reviews
The purpose behind checking all the platforms where you have created accounts in the name of your business is to communicate with the customers who are posting reviews. You don’t just need to read the reviews but also reply to them.
Whether the review is positive or negative, you should write your response to it. When customers will notice that you have shared your comments in response to the reviews posted by them, they will appreciate you. If the customer has written a positive review, you can reply by commenting ‘Thank You’ below the review.
You can also write a detailed comment to thank them, for example, ‘Thanks for giving us a chance to serve you. We are glad that you liked our product/service. Hopefully, you will give us a chance to serve you again soon.”.
If the review is negative, you can share your response in a polite manner. You need to ask the customer about the reason behind their bad review. You can write a response, such as ‘We are sincerely sorry that you had such an experience. We make sure that none of our customers feels dissatisfied. However, we will look into the matter and ensure that it never happens again.”.
Many times, competitors post fake negative reviews to harm the online reputation of a business. If you believe that a negative review is fake, you should post a comment that hints towards your doubt regarding the genuineness of the review.
You may post a comment, such as ‘We feel bad for how you felt, but despite trying every means, we could not find your name in our record of customers. Are you sure you are reviewing the right business?”. It will let prospective customers know that the reviewer might have made some mistake in identifying the profile of a business.
If you reply only to positive reviews and not negative reviews, it gives a terrible impression to the customers. It subtly hints toward the fact that you don’t care about the customers who have had bad experiences dealing with your business. Even if you know that a negative review is fake, you should not lose your calm. You should never be rude or use foul language in your responses.
Once you have taken care of the essentials mentioned above, you have won half the battle. In order to get customer reviews and form a favourable impression on both existing and prospective customers, you should be active on various social media sites, Google My Business, and social media channels.
How to Encourage Customer Reviews?
We have already emphasized the importance of customer reviews enough in this blog post. Reviews from your existing customers work like fuel to drive the growth of your business. When prospective customers see that people frequently post reviews for your business, they become sure that your products or services have a continuous demand in the market.
The more recent the reviews the higher the interest generated by prospective customers. Therefore, it’s necessary that you get customer reviews on a continual basis. The process to encourage customer reviews includes many aspects that you should consider.
Many entrepreneurs stay confused about how to get customers to write a review and how to get good reviews from customers. Well, garnering positive reviews from customers is not rocket science. You just need to gain knowledge regarding some points that matter. We have listed and explained those points below. You can implement them as tips to get more customer reviews.
Set Up a Well-Planned System to Get Reviews
You must be having a proper system in your organisation to record attendance, pay salaries, maintain cleanliness, hold meetings, and so on. Business firms develop a system for every task or activity that takes place within their premises.
But they forget to create a system for garnering customer reviews. If you want your customers to leave reviews for your business on different platforms, you must have a well-planned system in place. Reviews cannot be obtained randomly or by chance. If you just wish and pray to get reviews without taking any concrete steps, you will never get as many reviews as you can get.
A system developed to get customer reviews is meant to answer some basic questions, such as ‘Who will ask the customer for the review?’, ‘When will the customer be asked to post a review?’, and ‘How to ask for reviews’.
If you want the maximum number of customers to post reviews online, you should have answers to all the aforementioned questions. Some customers write reviews on their own. Others have to be encouraged or convinced to post reviews for the products and services they have used. You should decide which executive from your enterprise will ask your customers for reviews.
The right person or executive to ask for reviews depends on the type of organisation. For example, in the case of a restaurant, the manager would be the right person. But in the case of a mobile application, the customer service representative would be the right person.
Along with deciding on the person, you also need to decide on the time and method. You should determine which would be the right time to ask the customer to post a review. If a customer is leaving your restaurant after enjoying a hearty meal, the manager can ask them to review your business online.
But if a new user has just downloaded and registered on the mobile application developed by your company, you should wait for a few days before you can ask for a review. In several cases, customers can be asked to provide reviews at multiple stages.
The next aspect that you need to think about is how to ask for a review. You have various options when it comes to methods or ways of asking for reviews. You can interact with customers through emails, social media channels, text messages, and other mediums.
The first step toward figuring out how to get customers to review your business is to determine the right person, time, and method. The best way to get more and more customers to post online reviews about your business is to have both manual and automated systems. An example of an automated system is the pre-scheduled delivery of emails that contain a monthly customer feedback form.
Make it Easy for Customers to Post Reviews
Thinking only about getting maximum reviews without worrying about the convenience of customers is a bit selfish approach. You should make the whole process of writing reviews easy for your customers. No doubt, many people are enthusiastic about sharing their experiences online in the form of reviews.
But, as we have mentioned earlier as well, some customers don’t think about posting reviews. You have to encourage them. If you want to know, ‘how to get customers to leave reviews’, the answer is that you need to make writing reviews a hassle-free task for your customers.
Now the question arises, ‘how can you do so?’. Well, there are many ways to do so. First and foremost, you must include links to various customer review websites in all your written communications. The emails that you send to your customers to know their opinions about your products or services must contain links to all those websites where you have created an account for your business.
When the recipients of emails will see that they just need to click on the link to reach their preferred platform to post a review about your business, they are most likely to post a review. You should highlight in your email properly that the customers just need to click on the links.
Another technique using which you can make the review writing process easy for your customers is to include a form with fields or bullet points that require information about the specific aspect related to a product or a service. In simple words, if you are including a customer feedback form in your emails, it should contain bullet points or fields that exactly specify the information the customer has to fill in. For example, ‘I am satisfied with my new microwave oven because it is/has _____________’.
You can even mention some features of the microwave oven in brackets to make the task simple for your customers. Features can include a timer, easy to clean, looks stylish, sleek, and so on. You can even create a form that has checkboxes or ratings from one to five.
Personalize the Message You Send to Customers
Whether you send an email, a text message, a Facebook message, or a WhatsApp message, the text or body of the email or message you send to your customers should be personalized. You should not send the same text to every customer by changing the greetings.
The customer should feel on reading your email or message that you have curated it specifically for them. Let’s say, two customers shopped on your website on the same day. While the first customer bought a winter jacket, the second customer bought a wristwatch. You should not send a generic email or message, such as ‘Last week, you bought a product from our website. We would like you to give a rating for the same.”.
Your email message should be specifically targeted toward the recipient. In the case of the first customer, the text can include sentences like, ‘Welcome to our family of valued customers. Last week, you bought a winter jacket from our website. We thank you for your purchase. Winter has already started and we hope that the jacket is meeting your needs. We would appreciate it if you take out a minute from your busy schedule to rate our product and customer service.’.
In the case of the second customer, the email or the message can have sentences like, ‘We are glad that you have become a part of our family of customers. We admire you for your taste since the wristwatch you purchased last week from our website is a piece of pure elegance. We are sure that you would have received several compliments for it. If you can spend a minute or two reviewing our product and customer service, we would be extremely glad.’.
Explain Why Reviews Matter to Your Business
The fact that you are reading this blog post proves that you know how important is it to understand how to get customer reviews. You know the growing significance of online reviews in today’s time. Reviews can help you acquire new customers, and thus, expand your customer base.
But how will your customers know why you are asking them for reviews? Unless your customer is also an entrepreneur, they will not understand the importance online reviews hold for your business. Very few of your customers might be entrepreneurs.
So, you need to explain to your customers why reviews matter to your business. You should use simple sentences and facts to state your point. The text or body of the email or message you send to your customers should be clear. Your customers should not feel pressurized, intimated, or overwhelmed by reading your email or message. They should not feel that you are being too aggressive to get reviews.
Reward Your Customers on Posting Reviews
People are mostly interested in conducting tasks that can yield one or more benefits. For example, you run your business to earn profits. Similarly, your employees work for you because they are paid salaries. If you want to get customer reviews, you should make the review posting activity beneficial for your customers.
The best way to do so is to reward your customers when they write reviews for your products or services on any platform. When you send an email to your customers to request them to post reviews, you should highlight properly that you will give them a reward.
You can decide on rewards as per your own preferences and budget. The types of rewards that business firms usually give to their customers on posting reviews include but are not limited to discount coupons, promo codes, freebies, loyalty cards, cashback, special offer prices, and early access to a certain product or service.
Incentivise Your Employees on Getting Reviews
Customers post reviews for businesses either out of the desire to share their opinions with the world or with the expectation to get rewards. Some customers might even post reviews to honour the request made by the business firm whose products or services they have bought.
But what do employees get for asking customers for reviews? Just like your customers, your employees also need a slight push or boost. Your employees work on the front line to get customer reviews or client reviews. They are the ones who ask your customers to write reviews.
So, you should provide incentives to your employees whenever their requests regarding reviews get fulfilled. You can set a target in terms of the number of reviews obtained or the number of customers approached to get reviews. You need to communicate these targets to every executive who handles the responsibility of requesting customers to post reviews.
Whenever your employees achieve or surpass the targets you have set, you should give them an incentive. The incentive can be in any form such as a bonus, a paid day off, free lunch or dinner, and so on. When you incentivise your employees, they will feel valued and put more effort to get customer reviews.
Follow Up on Your Requests to Get Reviews
The words like ‘perseverance’ and ‘persistence’ matter a lot in the lives of entrepreneurs. In order to become successful, every entrepreneur must show persistence. Business owners have to stay consistent and determined.
The aforementioned principles apply even to the task of obtaining reviews from customers. Sending emails and messages once is not enough. You need to follow up on every piece of communication made by you to get reviews from customers.
You should make a proper timeline about when to follow up on customer review requests. An appropriate gap should be kept between the initial communication and the follow-up communication. If you have sent an email today and the customer hasn’t posted the review, you should not send the next email tomorrow. You can send a follow-up email after four to five days. The gap between the initial and follow-up communications depends on the particular product or service that you sell.
Share Customer Reviews with Others
Every person loves to get recognised, especially on the internet. Online recognition makes people feel special. They feel delighted when others tag them in posts and comments on various websites and social media channels.
You can make your customers feel special and delighted by sharing on social media reviews posted by them. You can tag their profiles on your social media accounts while sharing reviews. But you must take their permission before mentioning anything about them or sharing their reviews on social media.
Along with taking care of the essentials and following the tips to get more customer reviews, you should pay heed to the small points that often get neglected. Garnering customer reviews is often seen as the last step of the customer journey or buying process.
Therefore, employees in an organisation tend to overlook the importance of customer reviews. As a result, they might not strive hard to get customer reviews. So, you need to create a culture and environment wherein employees understand the role of customers in making a business successful.
When employees become aware that frequent posting of reviews by customers will propel the growth of the enterprise, they show dedication in their efforts. The preparations required to carry out the process of obtaining reviews are also neglected. You should form a team that works toward planning and executing the process of getting customer reviews or client reviews.
Key Takeaways
Despite putting your best forward to please the customers in every possible way, you might notice some negative reviews for your business on different platforms. You should not feel disheartened or demotivated by those reviews. You just need to find the cause of those reviews and continue working toward improving your product offerings and customer service. Using customer reviews in marketing is a great way to prove the credibility of your business firm.
