Reviews are important for all businesses, but companies are often afraid of bad or vindictive reviews so shy away from asking for them or registering on review platforms.
However, people are getting much more savvy about reviews and can see though those vindictive reviews or ones from people who are clearly having a bad day. These type of reviews as well as irrelevant or unfair reviews about delivery or stock issues on platforms like Amazon, are ignored by most purchasers because it is obvious the review has nothing to do with the product itself. Most people when reading reviews tend to look for common issues that multiple people comment on, and are more interested in a balanced fair review with some substance than a rant or even a gushing positive review with no real substance.
If you do get negative comments in a review, it gives you something to act on and
valuable information to be able to address a potential issue with your product or service. A polite reply to a review, saying you are addressing the problem, can show that you and your company cares about feedback and wants to swiftly to put things right. A reply saying the problem has been addressed and outlining the changes is even better.
As well as written reviews, companies such as shoutout.social offer you the ability to capture video reviews via a simple widget embedded on your website. Video reviews are a new idea, but they enable your potential customers to see excited and enthusiastic customers which makes these review very trustworthy. They are also a lot more difficult to fake.
If you enable your customers to provide you text reviews, videos reviews or testimonials, I think that no reviews are worse than the occasional bad one so perhaps it’s time to go all out in capturing those reviews!
