Businesses: How To Improve Your Review Rating
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It’s nice when someone likes your brand — but it’s even nicer when they tell the world about how much they like it. With a big chunk of online consumers reading online reviews before making a purchasing decision, it’s imperative that businesses of all sizes make an effort to ensure that they have a review rating that makes a positive impression.
After all, think about it: would you risk giving your money to a business that has an online rating score of 2.5/5? Probably not. Would you purchase from a brand with a 4.8/5 rating? Absolutely.
You can’t always control what your customers say about you, but you can increase the chances that they say something positive. In this post, we’ll run through a few tried and tested tips for improving your review rating, which should lead to an increase in customers.
Look At Your Customer Experience
You can’t get into the heads of your customers, but you can take a broad look at what their experience of purchasing from your business is like.
Don’t assume that you’ve put together a seamless buying experience for your customers. Put it to the test. Visit your website (in incognito mode), browse your offerings, and then go through the ordering process.
Once it’s done, ask the following questions:
How easy was it to find the product you were looking for?
How easy was it to complete the payment process?
Did all the confirmation emails turn up at the right time?
If there’s any point where you feel things weren’t as smooth as they could have been, then you’ll know what you need to change.
Be Easy to Contact
There are few things that annoy customers more than brands that are happy to sell products, but not so happy to be contacted directly. No matter how much time and effort you put into perfecting your processes, there will always be things that go wrong from time to time.
When they do, your customers expect that you’ll pick up the phone and speak to them. In fact, if you take a look at the content of negative reviews, you’ll find that a big percentage of them relate to the difficulty the customer had contacting the company’s customer service.
It’s best to give your customers as many options as possible to contact you. Look at listing your phone number, email address, and social media accounts on your website.
Handle Issues
Of course, it’s not enough to simply pick up the phone. You’ll also need to handle whatever issue your customer has called about.
And you don’t just need to rectify the problem but do so quickly. Even if you fix the problem, a customer might still leave a negative review (or at least not an overly positive review) if it takes you months to resolve. A customer complaint should be dealt with with the same urgency that you would give to a potential new customer.
People pay attention to reviews that say ‘everything was great from beginning to end’; but they really like reviews that say ‘There was an issue and the company fixed it immediately.’ It gives potential customers peace of mind that their experience of dealing with the company will likely be positive.
Review Your Postage and Packaging Processes
The products you send to your customers will (or should) be in a perfect state when they leave your warehouse. But that’s not what counts when a customer is weighing up what they’ll leave in their review. What matters is the state the product is in when it arrives on your customer’s doorstep, and how long it takes to get there.
Your customers will almost certainly leave a bad review if the product takes an above-average amount of time to arrive, and is damaged once it does. It’s important to invest in high-quality packaging, like the options available at Packee, to prevent the risk of products becoming damaged in transit. You’ll also need to analyze the postage options available to ensure you pick the right courier company. Also, don’t be afraid to change shipping companies if you receive more than one complaint about arrival times — after all, your reputation is on the line.
Ask Customers to Leave Reviews
It’s just a fact that customers who have a negative experience are more likely to leave a review. Happy customers often simply go about their day, without leaving a glowing review.
One way to improve your rating score is to simply ask your customers to write a few words. It might not occur to them to do so on their own, but most customers are happy to leave a review if they’re asked. This post outlines some handy tips for asking your customers for reviews, but the bottom line is simply don’t be embarrassed to ask — showing a little initiative really can make a big difference to your business!
Respond to Reviews
You can’t always avoid negative reviews. Some people will want to be negative no matter how much effort you put into making things right. One way to mitigate the damage of a poor review is to respond to it directly, outlining your perspective. While it won’t work in all instances, you’ll generally find that potential customers pay more attention to your response than to the original review. If they can see that you tried to help the complaining customer, then they’ll at least know that you’re willing to make things right when things go wrong.
Go Above and Beyond
Finally, perhaps the best way to get more positive reviews and improve your review rating is to go above and beyond to ensure your customers have a great experience. For instance, could you include a freebie in your packaging? Or maybe you could contact after-sales care and outline tips on how the customer can get the most from their purchase.
By investing time and effort, you can ensure your customers have a great experience, increasing the chances that they’ll leave a positive review and come back in the future.
