Customer Reviews Require the Right Response
By using social media, companies can really get the most out of their reviews. “You don’t have to post a lot to be useful to your customers. Think of social media sites like Twitter and Facebook as an extension of your customer service department. Social media allows you to have conversations with your customers and provides them with another avenue to talk about your business,” Yelp company officials advise on their site.
Software Advice’s Friedenthal also recommends that companies request reviews from customers, adding that in some cases it could be worthwhile to offer small incentives to obtain reviews, though such reviews might be a little tainted due to the incentive.
“We tend to rely on the better nature of people to get reviews rather than incentives. I have mixed feelings about incentivizing to get reviews,” Friedenthal says.
FAKE REVIEWS POSE PROBLEMS
There are those who contend that paid or incentivized reviews might be of little use because they tend to read as fake, or that they often sound too good to be true and therefore aren’t trusted by the very audiences businesses are trying to attract.
Another problem comes from outright false reviews—reviews that are either from fake people or from people using multiple identities (which would skew review results one way or another). It’s an issue not only for third-party review sites but also in social media and in analytics that attempts to cull Big Data. While a single false review is not likely to make much of a difference, multiple ones could, so third-party review sites and some data analysis firms have been hard at work to create algorithms that can weed out bogus results.
Even if a review is real, most readers will look at it with skepticism if it is too positive or too negative, even if it appears on a neutral third-party site like Yelp (where 80 percent of reviews are positive, according to Washcovick). The less a reader trusts a review, the more likely she is to look at other reviews to confirm her impression of the business.
According to Invesp, nearly one third (32 percent) of consumers will read four to six online reviews before trusting a business. Another 24 percent will read two to three reviews, and 18 percent will read seven to 10 reviews.
Given all that, there can be little doubt about people’s faith in online reviews. The companies that do the best job of responding to them stand to gain the most in the form of improved customer service, higher revenue, and increased profits.
Phillip Britt is a freelance writer based in the Chicago area. He can be reached at spenterprises@wowway.com.
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