Customer reviews can have a substantial impact on your business’ brand equity, which can also translate to positive growth and return sales. According to market research by BrightLocal, 88 percent of customers trust in online reviews as they would a personal recommendation.
Unfortunately, while such user-generated content is an excellent way to establish trust and encourage conversions, it can also have unintended side effects. For example, your feedback mechanism can get flooded by fake or inaccurate reviews about your products or services. This can be done either by competitors, trolls, hackers, or simply users who want to take advantage of loopholes in your system.
Case in point: even major e-commerce players such as Amazon or Alibaba are not immune from fake reviews. These can badly distort rankings, ratings, and opinions, which can then negatively impact the trust factor that user reviews are supposed to impart. In addition, any notion that you might be using non-organic content into your review system (whether willfully or not) might result in your SEO taking a bad hit.
The solution here would be to optimize your review system in order to put the focus back where it belongs: the user. The key is to ensure an excellent user experience, stay balanced, and to take advantage of social connections, thereby increasing the likelihood that a prospective customer will trust an online review.
Tip #1: Curate the User Experience
Facilitating the product or service review process is not as simple as it looks, since it requires the perfect timing and context in order to bring out the most honest including constructive review from end-users.
A study conducted by the Spiegel Research Center explains that customers are much more likely to leave authentic, positive reviews when the system prompts them to do so. The reason is fairly simple: when a customer is upset with a product or service, they naturally feel inclined to leave a negative review immediately. If they are satisfied, however, the need to contribute positive feedback isn’t as strong.
Curation would be difficult if done manually, of course. To make it easier for any business to improve the experience of reviewing, a startup called Yotpo uses analytics to determine the best point in the sales cycle to introduce reviews. The platform then requests the user to provide feedback about their purchase at just the right time. It can be surprising to learn that there are big differences in how users prefer to review, depending on demographic, culture, and other factors. Yotpo takes all these factors into consideration in bringing out honest opinions from customers.
Big e-commerce platforms like Amazon and Alibaba would benefit greatly from such a solution. In fact, Yotpo just secured a $22 million funding round in order to better introduce its expertise to a growing enterprise market and to expand to more markets globally.
Tip #2: Encourage Balanced Feedback
Of course, the main aim here is to focus more on the positive reviews. However, your goal should not be to prevent bad reviews outright. The key here is to encourage positive reviews without necessarily suppressing bad reviews. In fact, having a healthy ratio of negative reviews is usually considered as an indicator that your brand is trustworthy enough to be transparent, it acknowledges the shortcomings, and addresses these after constructive criticism.
This means that presenting both sides of the story will help promote transparency and authenticity, which can help a reader establish better context when reading through customer reviewers. Otherwise, purely focusing on the positive side doesn’t give the full picture and can lead to false conclusions about the product or service.
It’s usually best not to show previous user reviews when you ask a customer for a new review based on a recent purchase. This prevents them from being influenced by others’ feedback, and it allows them to provide feedback more honestly.
Tip #3: Leverage Social Networks
Taking advantage of social networks is another way to combat fake reviews. By giving potential customers an idea who among their friends or contacts has also written reviews, this taps into the increased trust factor from getting information from people they know. Consumers trust word-of-mouth from friends more than they trust reviews in general, so it’s a good idea to establish connections whenever these exist.
This can be done by connecting your review platform to an existing social network like Facebook or Twitter. In fact, even Yotpo incorporates “verified” badges in its platform, which can help differentiate a review by a validated user against one that is generic.
In addition, this gives you another advantage: users can share their reviews on social media, which can help gain word-of-mouth mileage.
Takeaways and Conclusions: Establish Trust and Not Just Ratings
The important thing with using user-generated content as part of your content strategy is that it should be real and authentic in order to be that much more effective. Sure enough, any content strategy that involves user submissions can be cheated or gamed. But if you can curate, achieve balance, and encourage social sharing then you are on the right track in using reviews as an effective means of building trust around your brand.
