What is customer review?
You own a business and surely, you do your best to please your customers, satisfy their needs, and eventually try to keep them loyal to your brand. But even after putting in time and effort, to find out how your customers feel about you, you need to have a look at their opinions and experience.
Their opinions about the experience they have with your brand are helpful information that you can use to adjust your business to fit their needs more accurately.
Here comes customer review. Customer Review can be put as a written reflection of a customer’s experience with your company and their feedback on your services. Various sites which help you showcase and see reviews are Google Reviews, Amazon, Yelp, and social media.
Customer reviews are crucial. In fact, customers find online reviews to be so helpful that 85% of consumers trust them as much as personal recommendations.
The Impact of Customer Reviews
Reviews have the ability to influence consumer decisions and also strengthen a company’s credibility. Reviews help you gain customers’ trust and provide you an insight to people’s interaction with your company. Customer interaction ultimately leads to improved profits for businesses.
In the U.S, 93% of online shoppers determine whether a business has a good reputation or not based upon the available reviews. And reports also showed that,In 2016, 92% of consumers hesitated to make a purchase if there were no customer reviews, and a full 97% say customer reviews factor into their buying decisions.
68% trust reviews more when they see both good and bad scores and 95% suspect censorship or faked reviews when they don’t see bad scores.
Demonstrating your great service
Let us get one thing straight, you shouldn’t run away from bad reviews and you clearly cannot sweep them under the carpet. Negative reviews come from unhappy customers. This gives you a chance to respond to them publicly.
This won’t only boost your brand equity with the reviewer, but also demonstrates to all the wobbling browsers that you care about your customers’ opinion and you are ready to make amendments to enhance the quality of service you provide.
Why postitive reviews are important ?
So generally, very positive and very negative reviews have a tendency to become viral easily. Now here is the catch for businesses. Encouraging your customers to review your product/service is an easy way to expand your brand image. Now, let’s try to understand this with a little bit of the buyer journey. So, according to a research study, almost 63% of buyers do their initial search of SaaS products and services by checking into product review sites like G2. Therefore, having your product’s postive review speaks volumes already. Businesses can choose to tap here and engage with their customers in order to gain feedback and attain advocacy.
Take a referral read- Thank-you Note and appreciation letters for customers
How do consumers use bad reviews?
Consumers don’t only focus on bad reviews
It’s time you take advantage of the negative reviews and use it for customer success. There will always be bad reviews, but they are not enough to put most consumers off. Customers are more interested in the ratio of good to bad and that is what matters.
Consumers want complete information
Your customers want you to be transparent. This makes them trust in your brand. In this industry full of businesses, we all know that no product or service is completely perfect. Consumers want to know the few negatives so they can weigh them up against all the good points and then make a fully informed decision.
Customers notice when there are no bad reviews
Customers tend to get suspicious when a company has only good and no negative reviews. When you have customers from all different sectors, it’s normal to have complaints. But if your business has only positive reviews, it won’t take much time for customers to conclude that your services are so bad you have to censor customer feedback.
Bonus Tip: What is NPS, CSAT, CES? Why is it important?
Takeaway
There are plenty of advantages to having a truly balanced review system. Negative reviews are powerful and help drive immense business benefits. Both positive and negative reviews increase consumer engagement and trust in your brand while improving customer satisfaction, turning browsers into purchasers, and purchasers into loyal repeat customers.
So, maintain your positive reviews, answer the negative reviews and work on them. This will keep your customers satisfied and ensure Customer Success.
