Do you want to learn how to get good comments from customers? Our guide to obtaining more great customer reviews will teach you everything you need to know to get started.
It’s no secret that in the Information Age, consumers place high importance on the opinions of their peers.
Customer feedback is critical to the long-term success of any brand. In fact, nine out of ten individuals read online reviews before purchasing a product or service.
Positive reviews speak for themselves: a glowing testimonial or rating from a customer will throw the best light on your brand, helping to create trust, raise brand recognition, and bring more customers to your business.
But, in today’s hyper-connected digital world, you have to take the rough with the smooth. Negative and even fraudulent reviews will come your way regardless of who you are or how amazing a service you provide.
It’s pointless to hide them, especially when 60 percent of buyers will shun a brand that controls internet reviews.
Transparency is essential for your marketing and communications to be effective. That includes coping with unfavorable or even false public consumer feedback.
Here, we’ll look at the good, bad, and fraudulent world of internet reviews, providing suggestions and tools on how to deal with them or use them to your business’s advantage.
1. How to Handle Positive Customer Feedback
When you receive a positive review, your brand will immediately benefit from positive news. In fact, online reviews influence 67.7 percent of purchasing decisions
Fantastic ratings, on the other hand, are, well, good for business—and you can actually optimize their value even more.
Make use of your reviews as social proof
Humans will typically conform to the acts or suggestions of others, often based on their reviews or referrals—that is social proof in a nutshell.
Customer testimonials or evaluations are one of the most powerful types of social proof. So, by displaying your greatest online evaluations in the correct places, you’re more likely to create consumer trust, attract more customers, and enjoy a healthy degree of commercial growth.
Here are a few pointers to help you boost your positive internet reviews with a healthy dose of social proof:
To authenticate your brand’s performance and drive greater involvement, include testimonials, reviews, and ratings in your sponsored ad messaging.
Add a review tab or widget to your website so that visitors can easily see your good reviews and feedback. Make them nearly impossible to overlook!
Share excellent customer testimonials combined with eye-catching graphics on your most active social media networks.
Wherever possible, include favorable testimonials on your website. Positive customer quotations or feedback can be added to your homepage, about us page, product pages, and landing pages.
Increase the number of positive customer reviews
Another strategy to benefit from positive customer feedback is to obtain more of them. Not only will your client feedback be useful for enhancing your communications and service, but the better the ratings you receive, the more benefits you will receive.
There are numerous strategies to acquire additional positive feedback, ranging from signing up for popular review platforms to motivating your consumers to submit reviews across platforms in exchange for free shipping or a discount voucher.
2. Dealing with Negative Customer Reviews
We’ve already discussed how to maximize favorable internet reviews; now let’s dive into the murkier waters of dealing with bad customer evaluations.
You might be surprised to find that when someone encounters a negative review, they will spend around five times as much time exploring or surfing the website.
If you handle bad reviews correctly, you will not only demonstrate to everyone how committed you are to your customers, but you may even turn a disgruntled client into a loyal brand champion (at the very least, you will remedy the issue and avoid any actual brand harm).
Here’s what you should do.
Be quick and approachable, Get to the bottom of the problem
Whatever the customers say or the issue is, you should always attempt to respond to negative reviews and testimonials as soon as possible and in an approachable, polite tone.
You should never leave a negative review hanging in the digital ether or try to sweep it under the rug—doing so will make your brand appear untrustworthy and will ruin your reputation.
To properly respond to poor customer evaluations, you should respond individually, beginning with an apology on any public platform. In a nutshell, you must take control of the situation or it will take control of you.
How to React to Negative Customer Feedback
At the outset of your response, apologies, sympathize and own the problem (in that sequence). This approach humanizes your brand and helps to disarm dissatisfied customers, leaving them open to a sensible resolution.
Be professional while remaining conversational to ensure that your response is approachable and, most importantly, personable. Make an effort to address each customer by name.
Always provide a workable remedy to your customer’s problem and appreciate the bad reviewer for their input.
Track your internet visibility with tools that will notify you whenever you receive a review or someone mentions your company name online. This will allow you to reply to — and address — any negative web reviews as soon as possible.
3. How to Handle False Customer Reviews
What’s more aggravating than a steady trickle of negative feedback? Being bombarded with phony reviews—ratings and testimonials that are entirely bogus.
Fake reviews, as unfair as they are, do exist—and you will almost certainly have to deal with them from time to time.
Fraudulent reviews can be just as destructive as negative comments, but if you know how to recognize them (the major characteristics of false reviews or reviewers), you’ll be able to make an appropriate public reaction while asking to have them removed from the site in issue. Here are some characteristics of bogus online reviews:
They are imprecise or generic and lack any genuine detail.
They rely significantly more on verbs than nouns.
To sound serious, they use a lot of first-person pronouns like “I” or “me.”
They are normally given a five-star rating or a one-star rating.
The reviewer has a history of leaving several reviews in a variety of tones of voice or languages on a variety of platforms. Alternatively, they have no review history at all.
Each network, from Twitter and Facebook to Yelp and Amazon, will have its own review flagging or appeals process; understanding them ahead of time can help you deal with the issue as quickly as possible. Continue reading for more information on how to report them to Google.
Dealing with internet reviews can be a delicate business, but if you manage them with care and a feeling of urgency, you’ll not only protect your brand’s reputation, but you’ll also have a good chance of developing consumer ties.
Check out our 10-step approach to prepare for a social media crisis for more information on responding to difficult situations in the public domain.
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