It’s time to get honest here. How often do you read online reviews before you make a purchase or hire a service online? These days if you’re booking a hotel, looking for a car or even buying clothing online – many of us will check online reviews first.
Online reviews might be necessary for your personal life, but they’re also important to your business. Reviews can make or break a company, so it’s vital that you secure those positive reviews to boost your sales and generate income for your business.
Read more about why online reviews matter to your business below.
They can have a huge influence over consumer behavior
If you’ve been unsure of the impact of online reviews, then the infographic below can offer you more insight into how reviews influence consumer behavior:
Infographic by- Invesp
You’ll see that 90% of customers check online reviews before making a purchase. With a statistic as high as this, you can’t afford to have poor online reviews.
They can help you make improvements
Reviews are not only somewhere for you to receive praise for your services, but they can also be a place to find constructive criticism. Many 4-star reviews, for example, will say “I would’ve given this review five stars but…”, before offering some insight into how the service could have been improved. In the case of ticket reseller TicketOffices, customer reviews helped them to provide a better service and design a better user experience. Monitoring your customer reviews closely could help you to identify trends in consumer desires, so this you can help you offer them an improved service that is tailored to their needs.
They can help to drive sales
While more people are shopping online than ever, trust can still be something that holds them back from checking out. People have to put a lot of trust in the companies that they are buying from because they can no longer physically inspect items or deal with a person face to face. Online reviews, therefore, are as good as word of mouth in helping someone to make that final purchase. Reviews don’t have to be related to the service provided, and most of the reviews on websites like Amazon are actually related to the product – demonstrating how valuable they can be to a customer that’s on the fence over a purchase.
They can provide you with performance targets
Putting performance targets in place is a good motivator for your employees, and can help you set targets for the year. Not all targets have to be sales related, and if you want to ensure growth for your business this year, you’ll need to strengthen areas like customer service. Include some KPIs that will drive your employees to achieve better online reviews to help your business grow and enable you to pinpoint both your strong and weak areas for continuous improvements.
There’s no denying the impact of online reviews, so make sure your business is up to scratch by doing what you can to chase those five-star reviews and offer the best service possible to your customers.
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