Many small businesses rely on customer feedback to generate further business. Word of mouth is very important when you don’t have access to a multi-million pound marketing budget because it is often the only way a small business can get the word out about their products or services. The majority of people go online to check out product and service reviews before they buy and therefore customer reviews are very important. Trustpilot helps to facilitate this aspect of marketing, which is why we signed up for the service.
How Does Trustpilot Work?
Trustpilot is an independent company that gathers online reviews and places them in a central portal. Trustpilot collects the reviews on our behalf and we can then display them, good or bad, on our website. It is a simple process, but one that is invaluable for building a level of trust in our products and services. All Trustpilot reviews are genuine and each one is verified to ensure they come from unique customers and not just the same individual with an axe to grind.
Reasons to Love Trustpilot
- We love great reviews – Doesn’t everyone love great reviews? We are no different to any other company. Good reviews let us know we are doing it right, which is always a good thing when you work in a customer focussed environment.
- We don’t have time to go looking for customer reviews online – As much as we would love to have the time to go looking for customer feedback online so that we can post it on our website, we are much too busy doing what we do best, which is offering an excellent service to our clients.
- Customer feedback helps us improve our service – Sometimes we get it wrong. Yes, we are only human! So when this happens and a customer posts a less than complimentary review online, we own that feedback and learn from it.
- Positive reviews increase our sales – People like to read reviews before they buy. It’s a way of practicing ‘due diligence’. After all, if the majority of reviews about a retailer are less than complimentary, it is probably not a good idea to spend money with them! Conversely, if reviews are mostly positive, people are far more likely to use the company, which for us means an increase in sales.
- Informative reviews help the customer – Some customers have no idea what they want, which is why they go online looking for further information about a product. If a previous customer has left a helpful, informative review outlining why they bought the product it can be very useful to other potential customers. It may be enough to encourage them to give us a call and ask for further information.
You might be wondering why we don’t just write our own fake reviews. After all, who would know? But that is not the point. Trustpilot is a legitimate review site and we want people to trust us. Posting a few dodgy reviews stating how wonderful our service is is hardly likely to lead to a good relationship with our customers, whereas allowing genuine customer reviews on to our website is a positive thing.