Leverage Customer Reviews.  Here’s a no brainer, customers are the key to your business.

Every business has either a product or a service to sell but we’re talking about more than single customer transaction value, leverage customer reviews.  It’s these same customers who judge if your products or services are good and hence can decide the fate of your business and its future. So it is very important to leverage customer reviews how happy or disappointed they are with your services and in a competitive world to learn from your customers as frequently as possible. The more you hear from your customers, the better chances of you improving your business model through your products and/or services.
There are always two aspects of any business when you are reaching out to a customer; the product or service you are offering and the customer support or service you provide to them before and after sales. Both your product and customer service has to go hand-in-hand and even if one of these fail, the other cannot survive. More of such negative instances can eventually result in failure of your entire business.
As a business owner, it is very important that you leverage customer reviews and get them to talk about your products and services. This will help you know your own benefits and drawbacks in the market and hence can plan on how to improve and succeed. To leverage customer reviews will play a vital role in today’s marketing regardless of the type of business or business organization you are running. Internet being the primary mode of communication today, customers have several options and platforms or websites to express their experience with a product or a service they have bought. The experience can be good or bad or both and the fact is that customers write reviews more about negative experiences than the positive ones.
Most customers do not bother wasting their time writing reviews about products or services they buy either because they do not find any benefits out of it or simply do not find the need writing about it. People who are unhappy will surely write a review on Yelp, Facebook and other social media and review websites. But customers who are already happy about your products typically will not write anything as they feel satisfied and don’t have the time or consider the impact. What they do not realize is that their reviews can indirectly advertise to more new customers.
Customers often need to be asked and you need to make it easy for them. Offering discount coupons, goodies or gift vouchers that will attract them to write reviews and not just asking them to go to a site and find my business and write a review. That’s a big ask. It is worth giving something in return to customers for writing positive reviews because when a potential customer reads that positive review, he she is more likely to buy your product. Especially an incentive that drives repeat business like a discount offer.
Most big brands  leverage customer reviews as a strategy to both encourage and incent reviews and the technology to manage and unlock the marketing value of the testimonial. Platforms like eEndorsements bring this enterprise capability to small business regardless of industry.

Apart from getting your customers to write reviews, it’s equally important to manage those reviews. Customer reviews are stronger than print and media ads you spend a fortune on. With websites like Yelp consumers just prefer to read customer reviews before buying a product. To have that marketing exposure for small business is financially out of reach unless you leverage the voice of your customer as a brand ambassador. Since reviews are unbiased information, people tend to trust them more than anything else, especially if verified third party testimonials. Word of mouth spreads quicker than any other modes of communication. When it comes to reviews, Facebook reviews have proven very strong because of the number of users it attracts. Unlike Yelp, Facebook connects customers with their close friends, colleagues and family members and any review they write about your product will go out strong into the minds of readers. On Yelp you are no one but just a customer but on Facebook you are a loved one to hundreds of people and hence your whttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDLHs4yvVokords matter most on sites like Facebook. So, it’s important you have a mechanism to publish reviews to Facebook and similar social media sites and not burden the customer with too much initiative.

Bottom line as a business must leverage customer reviews its too big a part of the customer journey to ignore. The last thing you have time for is another process to manage and the very worst thing you can do is shift the burden to your customer. Stay tuned our next post we’ll further consider best practices to leverage customer reviews.

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