Small Business’s Handbook on Online Customer Reviews
Imagine you need a new vacuum cleaner.
And you don’t know much about technical specifications.
But you need to clean your delicate flooring, and it’s high time the pet hair disappeared from your sofa.
You visit websites of the main vacuum cleaner manufacturers and you check their flagship products. Dyson traps 99.99% of dust, Samsung offers superior cleaning quality and design, Electrolux tries to tempt you with a 4-step filtration system…
They all brag about their innovations, trying to show their superiority over the competition with numbers, percentages, and tones of adjectives. But for you, it’s just empty phrases.
Turns out that it’s not so easy to trust slogans on the website and base your decision on marketing tricks. And we’re talking about $450 cleaning equipment.
The feeling of confusion and anxiety is even stronger when you look for more expensive products or want to commit to a long-term contract with a service provider.
Your potential customers feel it too.
Help them make a conscious choice — add greater transparency and get online customer reviews.
Table of Contents
An online customer review is a consumer’s feedback on a product, service, or business shared on a digital platform.
Usually, customers share their opinions through written text, but some sites offer an option to rate the experience using stars or points as well.
The evaluation criteria can be predefined or left to reviewers.
So, at this point, you probably want to ask: “Can we trust online reviews?”
My answer is some of them.
How come? But all opinions are valuable! As a consumer, you get objective, first-hand info from people like you. It’s almost like seeing into the future — you get to know what to expect from the product or service after you see the “Thank you for choosing us” line.
Well, this is a utopian vision. Online reviews are not all created equal.
There are angry ex-employees and competitors out there. There are companies that plant fake reviews to promote their business. There are people who abuse the trust consumers put in online reviews.
And the stakes are high — customers trust online reviews more than experts and... friends!
So, how can you shield yourself from bogus reviews?
As a consumer,
check trustworthy review sites;
read reviews on several platforms;
learn how to spot fake reviews; or
use technology that filters out suspicious reviews, such as ReviewMeta or Fakespot.
As a business owner,
support trustworthy review sites,
try getting fake reviews removed, or
respond publicly and explain the situation.
Yes, you got it right — both customers and business owners benefit from trustworthy review sites. But what makes a review site trustworthy?
Four words — its review verification process.
Make sure you understand how online reviews are verified. You can do so by answering these questions:
Can everybody share their opinion or only the people who purchased a product or service?
How does the website check whether the reviewers are actual customers?
How much information on the reviewers can we get?
What exactly is the rating based on — is the scale described? Is there a list of specific attributes that need to be considered?
Can the business reply to reviews?
Do your research and you’ll avoid disappointment, both as a customer and business owner.
It depends on your business profile. Let’s look at several possibilities.
Google my business
There are general review websites that you can use for any kind of business.
The most popular and trusted one is Google My Business. In 2019, almost 60% of shoppers declared that they use it to check reviews (Bizrateinsights, 2019).
It doesn’t come as a surprise. Google is the most popular search engine in the world, and you get access to online reviews when you put the name of the company in the search box.
As a business owner, you can benefit from getting online reviews on Google — they are easily accessible, you can respond to comments and flag fake reviews, and it’s our first instinct to google a company when we need more information.
You can also verify the reviewers, at least to some extent.
Only Google users, and by that I mean YouTube, Google Play, Google Maps, or Gmail, can share their feedback. The requirement to have some sort of account gives you more insight into the reviewers’ activities.
You can see how many reviews the person has written. If it’s only one, take it with a pinch of salt. If there are more, spend some time reading other examples and look for all kinds of weirdness.
Imagine you go through the reviews and see comments on restaurants only. All of them are negative. It looks suspicious, doesn’t it? Either the person devotes their life to visiting restaurants and has very peculiar taste buds or it’s an act of sabotage. Whichever seems more possible.
Unfortunately, the feeling in your guts is the only way to decide.
And that brings us to the minuses of this platform.
Google doesn’t verify whether the reviewer has actually consumed goods or services. You must agree it is quite an issue. Especially since you can’t do this work yourself.
The star rating system is also far from ideal. You can give a numerical rating without any explanation.
In this case, what do three stars mean? Amazing food and delayed delivery? Atmospheric interior and rude staff? Maybe a decent experience, but the reviewer was expecting more?
You get my point — It’s basically reading the tea leaves.
People now spend an average of 2 hours and 23 minutes per day on social media (Famemass, 2019). Why not use this potential and build a better reputation online with Facebook reviews?
Facebook reviews have the same benefits as Google reviews:
The reviewer has to have an account.
Your customers visit the platform regularly.
Any business can have a profile.
You can respond to comments.
You can report fake reviews.
But there is one more perk — Facebook profiles make it easier to verify online reviews. They offer extra information on users, such as photos, friends, and interests. As long as the profile owner doesn’t hide them, that is.
Yet, in most cases, you can spot a catfish.
Another bonus is the company profile.
Why is it worth mentioning? Because you decide on the content your potential customers are exposed to. Use it wisely — write a compelling description of your business, post photos, and bring your wall to life.
Review Sites Dedicated to Its Own Niche
Here’s the last option you can go for — review sites dedicated to its own niche, my favourite. Whatever it is you’re doing, there must be at least one website focused on your industry.
What I really appreciate about niche review sites is that they
help you show up on hard-to-rank queries like “best [your business profile] in the area,”
cover a topic in more detail, and
offer additional content to keep your customers in the loop.
Let’s look at the example that is close to my heart, Clutch. It’s a platform for IT, marketing, and business service providers.
Is your area of expertise missing from this list? No worries, I’ll show you what elements are essential, so you can identify the best niche review site for your business.
1. Information on the reviewer
You already know how important it is to verify reviewers. Clutch gives you the name, surname, position, and company name. That’s what you call full service!
2. Information on the business
By getting more context, your customers can see what kind of companies benefit from your services. And check whether you have some experience with businesses like theirs.
3. Verified reviews
Clutch verifies each review. One of their methods is identifying reviewers using LinkedIn. And the word verified next to customer feedback works magic.
Your customer doesn’t want to leave a review under their name? No problem. Clutch goes through this process even for white-label businesses. The reviewer remains anonymous, and you get social proof. Win-win, right?
4. Information on the project
Yet another way for your customers to check whether you’re the right fit for their project.
5. Detailed rating
The platform proposes four categories that make up for the overall rating — scheduling, cost, quality, and NPS (Net Promoter Score).
Remember how interpreting the rating can come to reading the tea leaves? In this case, your customers get full transparency. They can leave fortune-telling to psychics.
Now, it’s time to find a similar website that matches your needs. A quick search and my tips will point you in the right direction.
Some small businesses have a hard time getting online reviews. If you’re one of them, you’re definitely missing out on a low-cost way to promote your business, social proof that makes you look trustworthy, and an insight into customer expectations.
So, how can you fix it?
Ask your customers to make an effort and share their opinion.
I know what you’re thinking, I didn’t really reinvent the wheel. But it’s really that simple.
76% of those who are asked to leave reviews go on to do so (BrightLocal, 2019).
Now, by asking, I don’t mean calling each customer and giving them a speech anytime you feel like it. That would be time-consuming, invasive, and ineffective.
Wait for the right time.
Do you sell goods? Ask for a review right after the consumer receives the product. Do you offer business-to-business services? Wait till the whole project or a vital part of it ends.
You can pop the question in person, over the phone, via personal email, with the use of an email campaign, in your email signature, on a receipt, or via thank-you pages.
Increase your odds of success by
explaining how much it means to you,
being polite,
preparing all the data that is necessary to fill in the form,
describing the process of leaving a review (keep it brief, though!),
offering rewards, and
not being too pushy.
Create several email templates to save your time in the long run.
The average consumer reads 10 reviews before feeling able to trust a business (BrightLocal, 2019).
But don’t get fixed on this number.
The most important thing is to keep these reviews coming.
Almost one in two consumers only pay attention to reviews from the past 2 weeks, and 84% believe that reviews older than 3 months aren’t relevant (BrightLocal, 2019).
Make sure your review base is constantly growing. There should never be a point when you feel satisfied with the number of reviews.
All this time, I’ve been telling you how online reviews can move you into the higher league. But what happens when you get a poor review?
It’s not the end of the world. Surprisingly, negative reviews can have a positive impact on your image — they make you look more authentic.
Customers expect to see some complaints, they find a perfect 5.0 rating suspicious. The trick is to have a strong ratio of positive reviews to those that put you in a bad light. And not to leave these negative comments hanging.
Always respond to bad reviews. Don’t redirect the question to private messages, solve the problem publicly. While doing so,
stay calm and be polite,
get to the bottom of the issue,
tell your side of the story, and
solve the problem or make amends.
Your reply shows your attitude towards the customers. What you say and how you react are as important as the review itself. Follow these four points, and you will turn the tables.
It’s not a secret that more and more people are sceptical of ads. They look for more authentic descriptions of companies, services, and businesses. That’s why you need online customer reviews.
Online reviews influence the buyer decision process.
Make sure you identify the most beneficial review sites for your market and encourage customers to rate their experience.
Several up-to-date reviews later your customers will feel more confident clicking the add to basket button or filling out your contact form.
So, what is this buzzing noise in your house? Electrolux, Samsung, or Dyson?