If your customer lies at the heart of your business, i.e., you run a customer-centric business. The most essential metric for the same, that calculates how your customer thinks, knows and feels about your product or service are Customer Reviews. Gone are the days when customer reviews used to be merely word-of-mouth. In current times, there are social media & customer review sites in place for almost all businesses that gauge the emotions instilled in a consumer’s heart for their brand. Customers these days are very vocal and don’t hesitate in sharing their best to worst experiences about a brand. This not only ensures best service for the customers but also gives them a share of voice in the creation & marketing of products or service.
Impact of Customer Reviews on your Business
A direct perk resulting from positive customer reviews is sales. 9 out of 10 customers are more likely to buy a product if it has a set of positive genuine reviews. If a Hotel has a lot of 5 star ratings is highly likely to prosper against one having a bulk of 1 star ratings. Existing customer reviews play a key role in the decision making process for any buyer. Roughly, 86 % of millennial consumers claim to have been influenced by negative reviews while indulging in the buying process. Positive reviews increase user retention, make your app/website visible by enhancing your SEO and double your conversion rate & CTR.
Customer Review Management
Not having an effective Customer Review Management system in place that analyses and manages your firm’s customer reviews and engages with them in order to provide better solutions & solve their problems, will, in no time, result in a loss of your brand reputation & sales. Engaging in conversations with your customers will not only solve their problems but also may lead to game-changing innovations for your brand. It will also lead to a loss of dedicated but dissatisfied customers who may be just waiting to be heard or get their problems solved. A vocal customer is no less than a marketing tool.
Ways to Capitalise on Customer Reviews
- Perform social listening & research in order to resonate customer reviews with your brand story.
- Make sure that when a customer posts a review, an executive responds and takes relevant action on it, ensuring the loop gets closed.
- Give a premium to verified consumers on posting relevant reviews. Incentivize them.
- Form a Customer Community in order to give them a reason to stick to your brand and have a higher Lifetime Value.
- Make sure to have a very effective and interactive section for customers to post a review at. Google Play, Amazon, App Exchange are some examples having a highly effective review section for its consumers.
- Be Data- Driven and perform a lot of in depth surveys to dig deep into your consumers.
- Post & promote your positive reviews regularly & take actions on negative reviews to find new opportunities, essentially before they become a PR problem.
- Have a very positive aura around your brand on Social Media & Search Engines like Google, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.
Conclusion Reviews not only directly impact your total number of website visits or app downloads but also affect other aspects which eventually are beneficial for your business in the long run. If you truly want to improve your brands ranking, give enough attention to both positive as well as negative reviews.