For many years now, several companies have provided their customers and community members the opportunity to post customer reviews on their web sites or blogs, from long before the term ‘social media’ was even used. Customer reviews, often referred to as peer reviews in a social media context, offer various opportunities to businesses to improve the interaction, involvement and loyalty of their customers.
However, they are much more than that. Customer and peer reviews are very important sources of information and feedback for your business, strategy, marketing approach and even sales. Two phenomena play a crucial role in the impact peer reviews can have on your bottom-line: word-of-mouth and the trust that many people today put in them.
Not all peer reviews are created equally: reviews in context
According to several reports, peer reviews are even trusted more than brand messages. Obviously, the way in which people emotionally connect with reviewers plays a role here (family members or friends versus complete strangers, the degree of recognition, reputation, etc.). In other words, there is a relational and emotional context.
Furthermore, there is an external context. A smart consumer (and never underestimate consumers) knows that he should read peer reviews with a grain of salt. Take reviews for holiday resorts, for instance: it is obvious that during the high season, when there are many tourists, negative reviews will pop up more frequently than when it is quiet and the employees of the holiday resort have more time for the maintenance of the location and for a more personal service.
Customer reviews also depend on an experiential and circumstantial context: someone who experienced a week long sunshine during his vacation, is more positive than someone whose vacation literally drowned in rain. And there are also companies that don’t exactly play the game of customer reviews fair: many people do see that, unfortunately others don’t.
However, businesses have every interest in playing it fair (foul play, when detected, travels fast). Customer reviews offer much more possibilities than those which most people think of in the social peer influence age. Below you find several possibilities to use customer reviews in an efficient way. These are just a few examples in a really endless list that is only limited by imagination.
The improvement of product range, online marketing and customer experience
If your clients review your products, whether this involves tangible products or services, that’s a source of valuable feedback. To begin with, it’s already a sign they take the time to interact with your business. You have every interest not to fashion the reviews depending on terms like positive or negative only. Every input is important and, furthermore, when people want to criticize, they can also do it elsewhere. Of course on “social”, opinions can travel fast but reviews are what they are: “data”, feedback and content. There will always be variations in the reviews, but if, for example, a specific product continuously receives negative comments, you know that something is not right.
Let’s use the example of holiday resorts again. If one specific destination is always evaluated negatively, that’s a signal to intervene and maybe even remove that destination (temporarily) from your portfolio. The same applies for products that are distributed by you and even the products that you manufacture yourself. What one should do in this case, is interact with people and, if there is actually a problem, solve it. Obviously the same also applies for customer experience and for feedback on how you interact with people, just to name a few.
Customer reviews aren’t strictly about customer service, but they do offer you important feedback that allows you to improve both the customer experience as well as the efficiency of your online, offline marketing and customer service activities. You can really use the opinions from customer reviews everywhere with the necessary creativity and fantasy.
Search engine optimization: get found on the Web
With customer reviews most people don’t immediately think about SEO. However, it is definitely an element to take into account. In the end customer reviews are content: user-generated content.
What people write, ends up on your website or blog and is included in the indexation when crawlers search your website. This user-generated content ensures more possibilities to be found.
You can even add relevant keywords by offering people the possibility to tag their content and/or split it up into specific categories.
Sales by recommendations, trust and peer reviews
As said, various studies over the last years showed that people call increasingly upon the advice of friends and peers, even complete strangers, when preparing their purchases. They are less trusting of advertising and recommendations by companies. That is a fact. However, this is definitely not a result of social media. It often lies with the activities of the companies, the power of word-of-mouth and the increased control options of the consumer.
That phenomenon is strengthened by the increase of interaction possibilities, including social media. The power of peer reviews is huge. However, let’s not generalize: companies with a solid reputation are definitely trusted as such. There is a large difference in all these changes depending on the company, its culture, the sector, the communication strategy, etc.
However, customer reviews and peer reviews draw in new clients, certainly when the tone is positive and takes on the form of recommendations. And offering customer reviews will in any case ensure more sales. Why? Because companies that provide this option have a more trustworthy appearance, since they open themselves up. And ‘trust’ plays a large role in the buying journey.
Customer reviews and loyalty programs
While some companies take great efforts not to receive any reviews, there are other companies that practically beg for them. They even fit them into their customer loyalty or referral programs. For example, I know a provider of short vacations who asks every client, after a trip, to write a review and award a score to his accommodation.
For doing this, customers receive extra points in the company’s loyalty program, which they can use for a discount on a new trip. For the company, this offers the possibility to automatically observe, monitor and indicate ratings for all its destinations. The weighted averages of the ratings (a score) also appears at every destination. Not only does this provide a better idea for the future clients, but it also shows the company where there may be possible problems.
The inclusion of the customer reviews in a loyalty program further ensures a solid brand reputation, an excellent customer relation and a superior customer experience. You can also set up the customer reviews as such that people can leave tips. For example: what was a really fun thing they did during their vacation? For a seller of other products this could for example be tips for using those products better. This content can then be included and shared in different ways. Community and user-generated content!
Cross-channel, word-of-mouth and social sharing
The company I mentioned above does more with its customer reviews: it also includes them in its emails and other channels. You can also include your customer reviews in your social media presences and ensure that people share them. You can even tweet them.
By distributing this content via various channels, you improve the ability to find your company: after all, search engines increasingly focus on “social” content and real-time search whereby channels like Twitter and Facebook also provide incoming traffic.
The inclusion of customer reviews also works exceedingly well in email marketing. When British retailer eSpares, instead of referring to its products, referred to the peer reviews of these products in its email, this improved all metrics of the campaign, including sales.
Customer reviews: do it now!
If you are brave enough to open up your site and other online presences in a professional and “open” manner for honest customer reviews, you will benefit greatly: trust; a better conversion, SEO, links, buzz, cross-channel interaction possibilities, user-generated content, customer satisfaction, sales, important opinions for his business, you name it.
You simply need to take a team of people, professionally active in content marketing, cross-channel and social media, to look at how you can organize everything, integrate the correct flows, establish mechanisms, overcome the fear for possible problems, include customer service and learn how to deal with comments, think holistically and define the correct metrics.
From then on it’s merely an issue of creativity and doing it! The return is enormous. Trust, customer loyalty, word-of-mouth, conversion and sales are some of the results.
About J-P De Clerck
