What Positive Reviews Can Do For You And How To Get Them

In this day and age there are a plethora of different marketing tools and advertising channels which business owners and marketing professionals can and do explore. For many prospective customers however, the best possible endorsement for a local business is still likely to be one that comes from a real-life satisfied customer.

That does not mean that companies should neglect other forms of marketing and rely simply on hoping that your customers tell their friends about you and your products and services. Instead, it means that you should do everything that you can to encourage positive reviews from customers which you can then disseminate and utilise to widen your customer base. Fortunately, there are a number of different ways in which you can get these vital positive reviews.

Feedback cards

It may sound a little heavy-handed but the good old-fashioned feedback card can still be a great way to garner reviews from your customers. As long as your service is good, the majority of these should be positive.

This method is advantageous as it is very low cost and works extremely well in restaurants or similar businesses where the card can be presented to every customer with the bill. One potential downside however, is that this method also includes a good deal of collation and analysis which has to be done by hand.

Email surveys

What follows on from the aforementioned downside of feedback cards therefore, is the potential utilization of email surveys. These offer many of the same advantages as feedback cards but also allow for the implementation of a system by which customer responses are automatically analysed and tabulated.

It is important to be careful not to move away from the personal element of reviews when you use email surveys however. A genuine and heartfelt endorsement of your company from a real customer is far better than a ream of statistics or ratings.

SMS surveys

Sending your feedback surveys to customers via text messages is becoming an increasingly popular method of requesting and receiving reviews. These work well as people often have a compulsion to reply to a text message where they might delete an email or ignore a feedback card.

You must carefully consider the potential response of your particular customer base to this method of review gathering. In some cases people may feel that receiving text messages from a company they have used is invasive and simply annoying, and that will do nothing other than to lower their opinion of your business. However, you run that risk when asking for feedback no matter what method you use.

The personal touch - use your staff

Probably the most cost-effective way in which to gain positive reviews is by training your staff to routinely check with customers whether they have found your service satisfactory or how their experience has been. This also helps to build relationships, and if a less than satisfactory experience has been had, this can be acted upon quickly.

This has the double benefit of getting you the customer feedback which you can use and also itself adding to the feeling of good customer service which is likely to be vital to customer experience.