The more web reviews the better

You can’t stop websites carrying reviews of your company, even if some are borderline scurrilous, but you can dilute them with reviews from satisfied customers, says Nicola Eaton Sawford.

Nothing quite splits a group of senior managers and heats up a discussion like the question “should we encourage customers to post reviews about their experience of us in public?”.  

Enabling customers to air their views about you publicly is a real “knicker showing” exercise and you need to be prepared. Nothing focuses the minds of senior managers more. This transparency does have the desirable effect of speeding up change and improvements internally.

Generic review sites include Trust Pilot, Feefo, Reevoo, Yelp, Google Reviews and many more. But there are also a growing number of industry-specific sites such as the original Trip Advisor, Trusted Trader and The Review Place.

As a senior manager, it can be frustrating and downright scary to open yourselves up to customer critique and have those messages shared with an audience you have absolutely no control over. You might well wish review sites would just go away, but they won’t. Playing the ostrich won’t help – it just means customers are out there talking about you, good or bad, having an impact on your business but you are not seeing it and other customers are not seeing you respond to it.  

There is a strong argument that says it is better to get out there and join in the conversation, correcting any false information, putting right anything that has gone wrong and impressing prospective customers with your approach to dealing with problems.

Prospective customers are a pretty savvy bunch. They read a selection of reviews and take a balanced view. If the majority are poor, it is true they are unlikely to come to you. If the majority are good, they probably will consider you. If the majority are good and you have taken the time to address them really well, they will certainly consider you. If the vast majority of your reviews are exceptional, you will clean up.

They are also pretty savvy about evaluating the number of reviews – few people would trust a 5-star single review on Amazon – it is too likely that the seller was behind the content. But several good reviews engender a lot of confidence and are a powerful influence in driving customers to purchase.  

You have nothing to fear from the occasional negative review – unless exceptionally extreme, that will not force any business to put up the closed sign. Unless, of course, it is the only review out there. This is one reason why you might want to actively encourage your customers to review you online, diluting the odd negative post and balancing up the perception of being good overall.

Organisations that do not actively encourage customers to leave reviews somewhere, either on their own website or on a review site, run the risk that only customers with extreme feelings one way or the other will post reviews that air in public.

Take John Lewis as an example, well known for being exceptional when it comes to customer experience – it performs highly in every benchmarking exercise I have ever seen. On Trust Pilot, however, they are rated Bad – 1.5 out of 10. John Lewis does not subscribe to Trust Pilot, so it is not pushing customers there. Customers with extreme views one way or the other are choosing to go there and post reviews. Naturally, those customers most motivated to publicly share their view on an experience tend to be the most disgruntled.

Amazon, which also does not subscribe to Trust Pilot, is rated average with 5.3 out of 10. It too scores very highly in published surveys where the views of a cross-section of customers are canvassed, rather than just the extremes.

Wiggle, on the other hand, is an active subscriber, encouraging its customers to review the company on Trust Pilot. Its reviews rate it as excellent, with 9.2 out of 10, and a spread of scores more in line with what you would expect for an organisation that we know delivers great customer experience. Boohoo is rated very good at 7.5 out of 10, with a spread of scores reflective of the experience it delivers.

When it comes to review sites, it is generally better for you to be in than out, actively encouraging your customers to post reviews. And if you cannot be in (you will not want to subscribe to everything), at least be there listening and learning from the reviews and wherever possible, responding constructively.

Nicola Eaton Sawford, managing director, Customerwhisperers.com, and co-author of The Nature of Customer Experience