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Positive reviews are crucial to get a business off the ground. Consumers, especially online, are trying to understand if they can trust a product or service, and whether the company's reputation is strong. To achieve this, they refer to the reviews of peers who have already been the guinea-pig.
In addition to stars for a quick read, comments can often make or break a company's e-reputation. Customer reviews are therefore vital, but how can you quickly receive a large number of sincere and positive reviews?
1. Create a customer-centric corporate culture
Once a customer has been acquired, we tend not to contact him or know what he thinks about the product or service.
Some companies are even apprehensive about asking for feedback: fear of disturbing, of not getting an answer or fear of starting a conversation only to discover that customer’s silence does not necessarily means that he is satisfied.
Customers are not often going to leave you spontaneous feedbacks, they have to be asked to write a comment. Especially since you won't be able to get feedbacks from everyone: many customers don't comment at all because they don't have the time, or because they're not looking for a dispute, or simply because they don't see what they will earn for themselves in doing this.
But this lack of sharing is detrimental to a company: without knowing what the customer thought of the whole experience, it's impossible to understand why they don't repurchase. Many customers are thuslost forever, disappointed by an experience or the quality of products and services.
The company doesn't know that itcould have done better, that the customer is already lost after his first purchase, and the business will even repeat its mistakes many times on other customers without knowing why those customers will also lose interest in it’s products and prefer the competitors.
The first strategy to get positive customer reviews is therefore not to break the link with the customer: you must keep on understanding the customer, once he has become a customer for a certain time.
Put into practice:
- Once the order has been placed, send a satisfaction survey with a mail automation, just a few days after receipt. Make two or three follow-ups.
- After each purchase or even between two long periods without repurchase, send new surveys to make sure that the customer is till satisfied throughout his or her customer lifetime value.
2. Prompt customers with an interesting reward
If reviews really matter to you, don't hesitate to incentivize customers with gift cards or exclusive content: yes, the customer has the right to be rewarded for sharing!
The task here is to find a reward that is motivating enough but nevertheless measured to obtain a review. Here again, the first communications with customers will let you to know what can motivate them.
Be careful, these rewards have to be considered in a transparent and properly explained context: the submitted reviews must not be given in exchange for something that could be considered as a bribery attempt to obtain a false review.
Put into practice:
- Specify how you want to collect the review: insert the link if the review is collected on a platform, and explain how the customer will receive his gift card once his review is submitted
- Specify that the review must sincerely reflect the experience and be written in a respectful manner, and link the message to a ethical charter on your website,if necessary
- Finally,specify that regardless of the rating left, the customer will be entitled to gethis reward in any cases, which leaves no doubt about a possible « corruption »
3. Explain why you need feedback
Companies sometimes tend to ask for feedback without explaining why and how it will be used. Clarifying how the feedback will be used can also help motivate the gathering of feedback more quickly.
Put into practice:
- Be sincere with your customers and explain how customer reviews help you in your business, how they can help other customers make their choices and that these reviews really matter to you.
- Also reassure them that thereviews are anonymous once published.
4. Turn conversations and live shopping into feedback
Can you speak directly with your customer, by message or on the phone? Take this opportunity to ask for feedback!
A chat is an opportunity to create a special bond with your customer, to get to know him better, to better understand how your product met or didn't meet his/her needs. It can even help you launch new products or services!
If you've gotten into live shopping, live events are a great time to gather feedback.
Put into practice:
- On the phone or by message, lead the conversation: ... "thank you for our chat, I seize this opportunity to ask you if everything went well for the delivery? What did you think of our product? Did you test it?
What was your first impression?" End with a crucial question: "Would you be ready to buy from us again? To recommend us?"
- During a live shopping event: openly ask questions to the community
5. Plan the questions that really matter to you
These questions should be planned ahead. Obviously, when you are looking to gather reviews, at the very beginning you will only have a few questions in mind, but they will eventually grow.
Especially since customers sometimes want to say good things about a company but don't necessarily know how to phrase it. It's up to you to isolate themes on which customers will just have to position themselves.
Put into practice:
- Write down the themes on which you would like to have a feedback, three main themes can be enough such as: the quality of the product, the diversity of the payment methods, the delivery(delay)
- Opt for closed questions and seeif the customer wants to develop his/her answer on a particular subject
- Use this topic to create othermore specific questions to plan future questionnaires
6. Answer to negative reviews
In addition to the reviews, future customers will also read the answers that the company made to reviews.
We advise you to answer to all reviews, to say thank you for example, following a positive review. This is an opportunity for you to acknowledge the reviews and show your customer service is real.
Put into practice:
- If it is advisable to answer all the reviews, it is especially essential to answer the negative reviews. Providing your response allows you to show potential customers that a real team exists behind the product and that it cares about customer satisfaction.
7. Use social network comments as "alternative" feedbacks
Social networks are also the great place to collect customer’s opinions and feelings.
In comments or private messages, your customers also share feedback with you, so it's up to you to use it, because it's a quickly collected content that you don't even have to ask for!
Of course you won't be able to publish this content on approved platforms like Trustpilot or Google reviews, but you can still advertise it on your website. It will then be easy for suspicious customers to check, if they wish, that these comments are posted under the posts of your social networks.
Several platforms are specialized in the collection of quality reviews, through different means.
Which apps to collect reviews?
Yotpo review
Yotpo review collection platform helps to generate true reviews by different means of communication. Mails and SMS are sent with a relevant message and to get all the chances to get reviews:
- By asking for reviews directly in the customer journey, without friction: the review request is sent by SMS or email when the customer is most willing to give a review
- By providing a framework for collecting higher quality reviews
- By customizing questions according to the products purchased
- By offering the video review feature
- By allowing the creation of a real community, including questions and answers « forum »
Product review
Product review is the review collection app developed by Shopify. It will be fully integrated to your website and your Shopify theme.
- The app provides you with a clear and simple back office to manage your reviews
- Classify your reviews as published/unpublished/spam or put a flag on them to make them easier to find
- Reviews are automatically attached to the product they are left for: check if some products get more reviews than others and launch emails or sms campaigns to collect reviews onless commented products
- Generate code snippets to link reviews with product pages and boost your SEO score in the Google SERP
- Collect badges to showcase your product collections
Judge.me
With Judge.me, you can dust off the collection of customer reviews to get :
- Photo or video customer reviews
- At the best time: automatically after orders
- Reviews can also boost yourconversion rate by being reused on social networks or Google Shopping
- Question and answer systems arealso available
Merge live shopping and customer reviews to increase the power of your e-reputation
Live shopping is a live event where you showcase your clickable products in the live stream.
The community can buy the products during the live stream and talk with you in a chat. Thisis a good way to collect reviews and allow open questions, which review apps won't necessarily allow.
Indeed, review apps will help you to collect stars and opinions but in a limited number of characters and on a number of topics chosen in advance.
With live shopping, open up the conversation again on all possible subjects and collect data that is impossible to collect elsewhere at the moment you talk to your community. It is also the fastest and easiest way to get an answer to a question you ask, without latency, inabsolute immediacy!
You have two options:
- Start live shopping to begincollecting reviews
- Use live shopping in addition to your review app to collect new kinds of reviews and, in parallel, increase the number of reviews that will be collected on your review app
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