Online customer reviews are necessary for the ongoing benefit of any brand. Positive reviews talk for themselves: a glowing testimonial or rating from a customer will shine your brand in its best light and help build trust, boost brand awareness, and drive more consumers to your business.
No matter who you are or how useful a service you offer, damaging and even fake reviews will come your way. So for your marketing and communications to hold any weight, transparency is critical. And that means buying with public customer reviews that are fake and negative.
Online Customer Reviews
Let’s look at the great, the bad, and the fake world of online reviews, offering tips and resources and how you can tackle them or use them to your business-boosting advantage.
1. Managing Good Customer Reviews
According to Andrew Defrancesco good reviews are good for sales—and you can maximize their benefit even more. Humans will adapt to the actions or recommendations of others, often based on their surveys or referrals—that’s social evidence in a nutshell. Customer reviews are one of the most potent forms of social proof. So, suppose you reveal your best online reviews in suitable accommodations. In that case, you’re likely to grow consumer trust, bring more people to your company, and appreciate a wholesome level of economic growth.
To maximize your genuine online reviews with a good old dash of social proof:
- Add reviews, testimonials, and ratings to your paid ad communications to certify your performance as a brand and promote more engagement.
- Set a review tab or widget on your website so people can recognize your positive reviews and feedback with ease. Deliver them unmanageable to miss!
- Share strong consumer credentials along with attention-grabbing descriptions over your most-engaged social media stages.
- Write positive testimonials on your website where required. Your homepage, product pages, about us page, and landing pages are good spots to throw positive client quotes or feedback.
Another way to maximize genuine customer reviews is to get more of them. Not only will your customer feedback help as vital data for enhancing your information and service, but the more significant reviews you will get, the more you will profit. From signing up to successful review platforms to incentivizing your customers to give reviews across platforms in a swap for free shipping or a discount coupon, there are many methods you can earn additional assertive feedback.
2. Tackling Negative Customer Reviews
You might be startled to discover that when someone comes over a bad review, they will pay around five times longer searching or browsing the website. So to control your negative reviews accurately, you must show everyone how dedicated you are to your customers. You could also turn a troubled customer into a loyal brand advocate. Here’s what should be done.
Be swift, be approachable. Get to the heart of the issue.
- No matter what the customers say or the issue, you should always reply to bad reviews testimonials as promptly as possible and in a convenient, friendly tone.
- You should never neglect a bad review trailing in the digital air or attempt to mop it under the virtual rug—acting so will make your brand seem reliable and hurt your reputation.
- To dispense with negative customer reviews efficiently, you should answer personally, managing with an apology over any public channel. In a nutshell, you require to take control of the situation, or it will hold you.
How To Respond To Negative Customer Reviews
- Confess, empathize, and admit the issue at the commencement of your acknowledgment. This plan will humanize your label and back to disarm the disgruntled customer, willing them open to a reasonable resolution.
- Be professional yet conversational to guarantee your response is available and, most importantly, personal. Try to reply to every client by their name.
- Constantly allow a practical resolution to your customer’s issue and appreciate the negative reviewer for their feedback.
- Follow your online presence with platforms that offer updates each time you receive a review or person who mentions your brand name online. It will help respond—and tackle—any negative online reviews quickly.
3. Dealing With Fake Customer Reviews
What’s more frustrating than an array of negative reviews? You may get troubled with fake reviews—ratings and testimonials that are entirely invented. As unfair as fake reviews may be, they do survive—and you’ll likely have to administer amidst them from time to time.
Fraudulent reviews can be as devastating as negative feedback. Still, by understanding how to spot them, you’ll be able to afford a suitable public acknowledgment while engaging to get them eliminated from the platform in question. Here are the standard features of fake online reviews:
- They lack any accurate detail and are vague or generic
- They are far heavier on verbs than nouns
- They use many first-person pronouns like “I” or “me” to appear sincere
- They are typically provided either a five or a one-star rating
The reviewer has a track record of giving lots of reviews using varying tones of voice or in other languages across many different platforms. Or they possess no review history at all.
Wrap Up
Each platform, right from Twitter and Facebook to Yelp and Amazon, will possess its review flagging or appeals process—comprehending these in advance will help you deal with the issue as swiftly as possible. Read on for further information on how to report them to Google. Apportioning with online reviews can be a complicated business, but managed with care and a certain judgment of urgency, you’ll not only protect your brand reputation—but also stand a substantial chance of restoring your customer bonds.
