Customer reviews now play a vital role in the purchasing process, whether for your physical shop or online. So you need to take care of your e-reputation if you want to increase conversions and attract new buyers. So you need to know how to analyse and process them so that they benefit you.
If you want to know everything there is to know about customer reviews, read on!
Key figures
- 50% of consumers write reviews of their purchases.
- Around 75% of consumers trust reviews left by customers before making a purchase.
- 71% of Internet users consider negative reviews to be more interesting than positive reviews.
- 85% of potential buyers look for this particular type of review.
The different customer advice solutions
There are various ways of collecting customer reviews of your company and displaying them online. These solutions are not necessarily all suited to your business sector, as each one has its own specific features. Here are a few examples:
Trustpilot
Truspilot allows you to collect ratings and comments from customers about your website, your products or services and your establishments. These reviews can be displayed on the Trustpilot directory, on your website and in Google search results.
To encourage customers to leave reviews, Trustpilot also gives you the option of sending automated e-mails and integrating a form on your site so that customers can leave a review directly via the merchant site.
Trip Advisor
Trip Advisor is a solution mainly used in the travel and hospitality sectors. It is used to collect reviews of hotels, rentals, restaurants, spas, cafés, etc. This solution also has a booking service to make it easier for users to make their reservations.
They will also be able to find other information about your business, such as your contact details, photos, a description, a link to your website, your prices, etc.
Guaranteed opinion company
The Société des avis garantis is a platform dedicated to e-tailers that allows you to collect reviews of your website and, more specifically, of your product sheets. Only reviews from people who have made one or more purchases are taken into account. The reviews collected are available on the platform’s directory, on your website and in Google search results.
This solution allows you to send automatic emails to customers asking for feedback on their purchasing experience. What’s more, there’s a “multilingual” function for automatically translating customer reviews and personalised emails.
Trusted Shops
Trusted Shops is mainly used in the e-commerce sector. This solution is used to collect customer reviews of your e-commerce site and your products or services.
The ratings can be displayed on the site’s directory, on the site itself, in Google search results and on social networks. One of the special features of this solution is that it has the Google Partner badge, which is rare for this kind of tool.
Google My Business
Google My Business allows you to group together information about your business on a form that appears when users search for your business on Google. The listing includes your business name, contact details, location, opening hours and customer reviews. If these reviews are well managed, they will motivate users to go to your website or physical location and make a purchase.
This social network allows you to collect reviews and display them on your company page. Recommendations on Facebook are not to be taken lightly, as 1/3 of people use them to form an opinion about the company in question.
Our guide to managing customer reviews
Your customers leave comments about your company, your website, your products, etc. You may be wondering what you should do with these comments and how to deal with negative comments that could damage your e-reputation.
Here’s how you can analyse customer reviews and process them so that you get something positive out of them and negative reviews don’t harm you.
Collect and display your customer reviews
Register your site with customer review solutions
There are many such solutions, some of which we have already listed, but there are many more! They allow you to collect notes and comments on different aspects of your business, respond to them and display them on the platform or directly on your website.
Share your score
Display your stars as much as possible. Take advantage of your good ratings and make sure that users can see your stars in Google search results, on your social networks, in your adverts, etc. This will make you more visible and help you attract new customers.
These stars will have an impact on your click-through rate because they are representative of your quality and reliability. What’s more, they will catch the eye of users who prefer to click on search results that have them.
Encourage users to leave reviews
This stage is by far the most decisive. Here are a few techniques to encourage your customers to leave reviews after making a purchase.
Send automatic emails/sms
One possibility is to send automatic, personalised emails/sms to people making a purchase. In these e-mails, you invite your customers to share their experience and thus collect more opinions. Make sure they are scheduled to arrive no more than 2 days after the purchase so that they remember their experience (the sooner the better).
Integrate automatic forms into your website
Automatic customer feedback forms work on the same principle as automatic emails and text messages: after making a purchase or during their visit, users can leave a review of their experience directly via a form displayed on your website.
Create a community on social networks
If you manage to create a community on your social networks and these people follow you and interact with your publications, it means that they like you. So they’re likely to leave you positive reviews and you won’t have too much trouble engaging them.
Process all notices
Read the reviews
Reading your comments will help you to identify areas for improvement and innovation that come directly from your customers. By considering these comments, you will be able to highlight the points on which users are particularly satisfied. As for negative reviews, try to identify the areas where you can make improvements.
Respond to notices
It is necessary to deal with both positive and negative opinions.
Before making a purchase, 97% of consumers take into account the responses you leave to reviews. If we take the case of negative reviews, 85% of potential buyers look for these reviews in particular, and they can therefore cost you a lot of business.
By responding to your customers’ reviews, you strengthen the links with your customers and show that you’re listening. It’s also an opportunity to give your company credibility and show your professionalism. In this way, you can attract new customers and encourage your existing customers to return.
Unfortunately, you’re bound to come across negative reviews from unhappy customers. It is strongly recommended that you deal with these reviews to provide reassurance to other users who may read them and to the customers in question.
Determine the trend
When processing customer reviews, you need to identify trends so that you can bounce back as quickly as possible.
If the trend is negative, quickly make changes based on the negative reviews to try to reverse the trend. If the trend is positive and there is a steady stream of positive reviews, you can assume that you don’t need to make any immediate changes.
Categorise reviews
It is advisable to categorise your opinions so that you can draw conclusions from them. You can divide them by :
Tone: positive, negative, neutral
Theme: What are the reviews about (the product, the location, the staff, etc.)?
Type of review: generic reviews, questions about operations, etc.
Determine customer value
You need to assess the value of the customers who leave these reviews. The value of a customer represents what that customer earns you or could earn you as a loyal customer. A review from a loyal customer should be given more attention and be treated as a priority.
Apply the changes
As we said earlier, negative reviews give you ideas for improvement which, once implemented, could increase your positive feedback and consequently your visibility and sales. Positive reviews, on the other hand, enable you to reinforce your good practices and highlight them as your company’s strong points.
The repercussions of customer reviews
Better referencing
As you may know, customer reviews are one of the criteria taken into account for your ranking in the SERP. Search engines like Google will rank you by taking into account a number of parameters: the number of reviews, the average rating, reliability and the number of sites hosting your customer reviews.
If customer reviews influence your ranking, it’s because Google considers them to be relevant content. The relevance, content and quality of these reviews should be taken into account when optimising your SEO.
To take full advantage of customer reviews and give your company credibility in the eyes of the algorithms, your mission is to collect as many reviews as possible by encouraging your satisfied customers to express themselves.
Confidence
Most people scrutinise customer reviews before putting their trust in a company and paying for a product or service. They often compare several companies on the basis of these reviews to make their choice.
If you have predominantly positive reviews and handle negative customer feedback well, this will give potential buyers confidence and credit for your business.
Avenues for improvement
Secondly, consumer opinions can provide your company with insights, ideas, comments and suggestions to generate ever greater customer satisfaction. Take your customers’ comments into account so that you can learn from them and optimise your internal processes and communication strategy.
Increased in-store traffic
Finally, the reviews you collect will help to boost your drive to store, which aims to generate traffic to your physical location. This applies to e-commerce as much as to physical shops! You’ll boost your sales and your customers will become your brand ambassadors.
In conclusion, take time to process all your customer reviews! Reading, analysing and responding to these reviews… all these actions will give your e-reputation a boost and improve your results at the same time.
Passionate about marketing, Théo is currently doing a bachelor’s degree in e-business and follows all the news of the digital world very closely. As an intern at DJM, he specialises in the fields of Search Engine Advertising (SEA) and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
