The appeal of a positive user review for a business is plain to see. Good reviews can effectively function as a form of free marketing – customers telling others how positive their experience was and spreading positive word of mouth. When the aggregate scores for your brand on platforms like Google or the App Store are high, that can encourage people to opt for your brand over competitors without doing much more research than that.
However, a good review is not guaranteed, which means that improving your chances of a good score might be an important part of your customer experience.
1. Leave a Link
This might be a decision that you’re unsure about. On the one hand, leaving a link to where to leave a review after your customer has made a transaction or sought help through your website or app can be encouraging. On the other hand, you might feel as though there’s a chance that this prompting might sour an otherwise positive experience. It’s worth doing, though, as you might find it leads more people to do so than would otherwise think to, and if you’re worried about how the message comes across, being gentle and transparent with the message might help it to appear less pushy.
2. Consider the Whole Experience
If you want to improve your chance of a good review, you could read some reviews of similar brands (or even your own) and get a sense of where negativity can often come from. This can lead to you buttressing your own business and patching any potential holes. The result could be that you begin to get a much more thorough sense of what is included in your customer experience, from how your audiences feel about your marketing to how you could improve your delivery with companies like Shiply.
3. Commitment to Quality
Of course, everyone wants customers to leave good reviews. However, going straight to asking for them without delivering the kind of experience that warrants it could well have the opposite effect. The most straightforward path to good reviews is simply to have a commitment to quality. If customers are happy with what they saw when they engaged with your brand, they might want others to know so that your business is as supported as possible. Positive word of mouth is the aim of these reviews, but that all starts with what you’re offering.
4. Think About Responses
Not every review will be glowing, and that won’t always be your fault. However, there’s a lot of importance on how you respond to negative reviews. Blaming the customer or being aggressive will likely reflect badly on your brand, and it could be more telling than you expect it to be. It might instead be better to think of these interactions as a chance for you to obtain vital customer feedback by asking what’s wrong, and it could even be seen as a marketing opportunity in how eager you are to improve in response to criticism.
