Online reviews are a source of competitive advantage for business 

Introduction

The advent of digital technology and social media has enabled a more effective and efficient Business-to-Customer engagement, from target marketing to customer acquisition and subsequent relationship management throughout the customer lifetime cycle. Effective customer engagement will enable businesses to understand their customers better, deliver to their satisfaction, and ensure business growth through customer loyalty. 

But how do you get more reviews online? The following tips, organized in logical order, will guide you;

Be honest with your objective for initiating online reviews.

In the world of “Me Too” or Fear of Missing Out (FOMO), it is not unlikely that many organizations have or will jump on the bandwagon to get more reviews online without having a genuine reason for doing so. Don't waste your time and scarce resources. You may also aggravate customers unnecessarily when you don’t act on the feedback. Remember the adage, “Let sleeping dogs lie.” Be focused as an organization on why you want to establish the process and ensure your employees and customers are fully bought into it by creating necessary awareness and governance around managing the process and change.

Make it easy for customers to leave their reviews online. 

Traditionally, before the advent of digital technologies, businesses had one way or the other to garner feedback from their customers and even employees. It could be through customer satisfaction surveys, feedback registers, customer forums, and other means. These processes were slow, time-consuming, cumbersome, and of low reach. With the advent of the internet, the concepts have remained the same while the approach has changed. Now, businesses utilize online surveys, online forums, Voice-of-the-customer, transactional surveys, data mining, and many other technologies. While we may be unable to dive deep into them all, we will address them in general, especially for online media like websites and social media handles. Place the feedback menus at conspicuous locations on your website, social media handles, and independent online review sites like Yelp, Google My Business, TripAdvisor, Trustpilot, etc. The feedback should be simple and short to attempt and not mind-boggling. It’s common nowadays to receive voluminous feedback questionnaires (>40 questions) from organizations wishing to collate customer feedback. This is preposterous and should be discouraged.

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Encourage customers to leave reviews.

The best way to encourage customers to leave reviews is to provide good quality service or products always. These will guarantee free word-of-mouth advertising and referrals for your business. Amazon (amazon.com) is one of the few businesses that have benefited from this. Another way is to incentivize the customers periodically for their efforts. This is not to game the system but to show appreciation for taking the time and effort to provide feedback, after all, using a marketing research firm would have cost the organization more than the negligible incentives. But a note of warning. Ensure not to violate any regulatory policies on incentivizing customers to get more reviews online.

The Prolyncs.com online booking and class scheduling appointment software has an integrated customer online review feature to enable you to receive customer feedback seamlessly for improved service delivery.

Work on the feedback as quickly as possible.

Nothing irritates the customers more than finding out their feedback is ignored or not taken seriously by the organization. As stated earlier, you may have visited some businesses lately and were inundated with countless surveys that were not used for any purpose. Provide feedback to your customers in the aggregate and timely on what you are doing about their solicited feedback. Be sincere about this and not make it a mere Public Relations stunt. Customers are well-informed now and can see through insincerity easily. Customer dissatisfaction issues should be addressed quickly while success stories and positive feedback should be shared amongst employees and customers to motivate and encourage more of such experiences. It is worth noting that the more responsive a business is to customer feedback, the more likelihood of the business remaining in the customer's mind and guaranteeing repeat business.

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Use online reviews as a basis of performance.

Lastly, use the online reviews as a measure or yardstick of performance for your business. Let it stretch your team to deliver excellent service. Excellent service motivates customers to provide more positive reviews and useful suggestions when you fall short. This will build more confidence in your team and promote better teamwork and collaboration, creating a win-win solution for your business and your customers. 

In conclusion

Businesses exist to provide service, and in doing so, aim to boost their revenue. Online reviews should lead to positive business outcomes i.e., more revenue and sales, new customer acquisition and retention, lower operating costs (through word-of-mouth advertising), effective resource management, and other relevant key performance indicators. By ensuring honesty and transparency of purpose in initiating online reviews as a strategic competitive advantage, incentivizing the feedback, and working diligently to make relevant improvements based on the feedback, your business will be on a sure path to meeting and exceeding customer satisfaction and loyalty for growth. This will also engender needed cost savings in running the business in the long term.

Do you need assistance to get more reviews online from your customers? Register today on Prolyncs.com or contact the product support team to access the necessary tools for managing your customer feedback for success.