Customer reviews are invaluable to your business. With 97% of consumers checking reviews before making a purchase, customer feedback is more thana ‘’nice to have’’, it’s a must.
Thankfully, consumers are ready and willing to share their opinions. With plenty of opportunities for consumers to give feedback on every transaction they make - both on and offline, customer insight is out there for the taking.
So, how do you choose which review tool or site is the best option for your business?
Contents
What makes a review useful:
- Benefits of customer reviews
- Best customer and product review websites:
- Facebook recommendations
- Google reviews
- Amazon reviews
- Yell.com
- Which?
- Yelp
- TripAdvisor
- Foursquare
- Feefo
What makes a review useful
To find the customer feedback platform that’s right for you, you need to know what you’re looking for in a review. Here’s what can make your reviews as helpful as possible:
- Your feedback should be authentic, from actual customers. Collecting reviews from real users of your business means that the insight is genuine, making it useful to both your brand and your potential customers
- Believe it or not, negative reviews, while unwelcome, can be useful to your company
- However 22% of consumers would find a business suspicious if they couldn’t find any negative reviews
- Aim to collect feedback from every part of the customer journey, not just the end. Gathering reviews at various stages of your customer’s experience ensures you get a clear picture of how you’re doing at every touchpoint, and highlights which areas could do with improvement
Benefits of customer reviews
Customer feedback is one of the most powerful insights into your business. Review platforms can have a positive impact on everything from your position in the search results to your brand reputation.
To find the best customer review platform to fit your needs, figure out what you’re going to be using your feedback for. Here are just a few of the benefits that customer reviews can have on your business.
Show your customers you’re listening
77% of customers view a brand more favourably if they’re asking for customer feedback and acting on it. Taking comments on board - and making all-important changes- can strengthen existing customer relationships and do wonders for your brand reputation.
Better understand your customers
You can gain a lot from your reviews. Neutral and negative feedback gives you a chance to learn and develop, as well as the opportunity to resolve issues with unhappy customers.
But feedback isn’t just for learning about your business - it also holds huge amounts of insight into your customers. From demographics, such as age and location, to how your customers are using your product, getting hold of this data can help you create buyer personas, identify your target audience and enable you to constantly improve your customer experience.
Make better business decisions
Adding an external perspective to your business decisions can help you make the right judgement calls. You may know your company well, but customer perception can be very different to how you view yourself as a business.
Opening up the floor to your customers and allowing their opinions to guide your decisions is a powerful move. We’ve seen some of our clients make effective decisions based on the views of their customers, from making more sustainable choices to expanding their customer service teams.
Transform your marketing strategy
Nothing is more persuasive than the voice of a happy customer. You can use positive reviews across your marketing - from your print ads to your homepage - to increase trust, boost conversion, and attract new customers.
A deeper dive into your reviews can even guide your marketing strategy. Customer feedback may highlight a use for your product you hadn’t considered, or help you fine-tune your tone of voice to match your target audience.
Best customer and product review websites
There are plenty of tools and sites available to collect and manage customer feedback, and what works for one business may not be as effective for another. Certain review sites cater to specific industries, and others focus on feedback for local, regional or worldwide businesses.
The great news is you don’t have to choose just one of these sites, tools, or platforms to collect customer reviews. Gathering customer feedback from a combination of these sites can give you a well-rounded view of how customers perceive your business, wherever they come from.
We won’t mention every feedback site out there, but instead give a rundown of the most popular, how they work, and the benefits of each.
Facebook Recommendations
Customer feedback may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Facebook. Surprisingly, Facebook reviews (officially called Facebook Recommendations)holds 19% of all customer reviews. With such a huge number of users, and 66% of those likely to share their experiences on their purchases there, Facebook is a powerful tool for building brand reputation - both online and for physical stores.
Unlike the commonly used 5-star rating system, Facebook uses ‘Yes/No’ options to get feedback from its users. Appearing on a business Page’s “Recommendations and Reviews” section, users answer a simple question: “Do you recommend (business name)?” Reviewers can answer with the click of a button, and then add more detail with more text, photos and tags.
To see reviews on your Facebook Business Page, click the Recommendations or Reviews tab under your profile picture. Facebook displays all reviews publicly, and you can’t make them private.
Responding to your feedback is important, and with Facebook Recommendations it’s simple. Like any other posts on Facebook, you can respond to your reviews by adding a comment or ‘reacting’ with a heart or a thumbs up.
Benefits of Facebook Recommendations
Facebook reviews can be really useful to your business, especially if you’re a small company. Here’s why:
- When someone reviews a business on Facebook, everyone in their network can see it. People trust word-of-mouth recommendations, and Facebook provides the online equivalent
- Looking up a company on a search engine such as Google will usually show the business address and links to its profiles. The search will also pull in a rating, which Facebook reviews feed into. By allowing these ratings on your Facebook Page, you add a trust signal right from the moment a potential customer searches for your business
- Reviews left on Facebook give a company a great opportunity to establish and personalise its brand identity. With the ability to respond to and interact with its customers, businesses can maintain customer relationships and encourage new ones within these online conversations
- It’s easy for most people to read and write reviews on Facebook - much more so than other sites such as TripAdvisor, Yelp or Google. More accessibility means more reviews, and more reviews mean more insight from your customers
Google reviews
With more than 60% of consumers checking Google reviews before they visit a business, this rating is one of the first things a potential customer will see when taking those first steps to using a brand.
Chances are, you’re very familiar with seeing Google reviews. They appear on the search engine in the Google Business profile which pops up if you’re searching for, “supermarket near me”, for example:
Google reviews will also appear on Google Maps when searching for a business.
Google’s popularity and influence mean the reviews left on the platform are far more widely read than those left on other sites - so understanding how to collect and manage them is important.
To start collecting Google reviews, you’ll need to claim your Google Business Profile. Here’s how:
- Search for your business’s name on Google
- Click ‘Own this Business?’ button in the Business Panel
- Google will need to verify your business before you can make changes to your profile
- Add photos and a description of your business
To leave a Google review, customers will need to:
- Log into their Gmail account
- Use Google to search for the business
- Click the reviews section
- Give the business a star-rating and a comment
- Click ‘post’
To make sure that the reviews give a transparent view of the business, Google won’t remove feedback solely because it’s negative. Google will only take down customer feedback if it violates any of its guidelines, so if you feel this is the case, simply flag the review as inappropriate.
Benefits of Google reviews
When it comes to brand awareness online, Google reviews are a must. Here’s how enabling Google reviews can benefit your business:
- Google reviews can boost your local search ranking. Rankings rely on several factors, one of those being prominence (how well-known a business is). To determine prominence, Google uses an accumulation of all of a business’s links, articles, directory listings, and - you guessed it - online reviews
- Consumers trust Google, and it dominates the search engine market. This means that consumers are willing to give that same trust and credibility to the reviews that Google displays
- A Google rating can improve click-through rates and convert more customers
Locations that improve their Google ratings from 3.5 to 3.7 can see a significant increase in conversions
Amazon reviews
As Amazon’s growth continues to skyrocket, so does the number of customer reviews left by its millions of users. Amazon has 310 million customers worldwide, with 66% of consumers starting their product search on the site. Competition on Amazon is fierce, but reviews could help set you apart.
Customer feedback is important to Amazon. From the moment you search for a product, its customer rating is one of the first things you’ll spot. Reviews feature heavily on product pages too, appearing directly under the name of the product, and numerous more times as you scroll down the page, from product comparisons to customer photos, and on-page reviews.
Amazon encourages customers to submit product feedback by sending email requests after shoppers receive their items. Otherwise, all customers have to do is:
- Go to the product page for the item, or ‘Your orders’
- Click ‘Write a product review’ in the customer reviews section
- Select a star rating. A green tick will appear when they submit the review
- Add text, photos or videos before clicking ‘Submit’
As a business, you can see all your Amazon reviews by visiting Your Profile.
Amazon has set some guidelines for customer reviews, and if they’re broken, they can suspend or remove your product listings permanently. It’s worth taking some time to become familiar with these rules, but here are the main things to consider:
- Don’t write feedback about your own business or your competitors. The same goes for your friends, family
- Don’t write fake reviews, whether positive or negative
- There should be no incentive offered to customers to write reviews, such as discounts or free products
Benefits of Amazon reviews
Collecting customer reviews on Amazon can have a great impact on your business. Here’s how:
- The Amazon review analysis tool can help you see which products are doing well, which need improvement, and what people like or dislike about them. These insights can help you understand any pain points, and help you improve your offering
- The Amazon algorithm searches for well-reviewed items to attract more traffic, so the more positive feedback your products have, the more likely it is they’ll get a higher position in the
- Amazon reviews are great for improving credibility within the platform. Any reviews that sit alongside a product rating offers social proof to shoppers
Yell.com
Yell.com is the UK’s largest online business directory. For free you can get a business profile including everything from contact details and opening times to photos and customer reviews. The Yell Reviews platform offers customers the chance to leave their thoughts on the business they’ve used and allows a two-way conversation between the business and the reviewer.
To leave a review on Yell.com, customers just need to search for the company on the site and click ‘Write a review’ at the bottom of the page. Reviewers sign into a Yell.com account to publish feedback, which can be set up using a Facebook or Google profile. Alternatively, they can sign in as a guest.
Benefits of Yell.com
With over 3 million business listings on Yell.com, businesses are seeing the benefits of Yell’s reviews platform.
- Yell is the digital replacement of the Yellow Pages, a printed directory that was a household name for 50 years before it went online. Always seen as a trustworthy and reliable source, consumers view Yell.com in a similar light
- Company owners can manage their listings and all associated customer reviews on the free app, so they can read and respond to feedback while out and about
- Although there are charges and add-ons for additional features for businesses, from a consumer’s point of view, Yell.com is completely free platform to leave open and honest feedback
Which?
A bit different from the rest of the platforms on our list, Which's own team writes its reviews, not the general public. An independent consumer review organisation, Which? tests and reviews products covering everything from washing machines to craft beer.
Most of Which’s content is available on its website completely free of charge, offering a monthly subscription for additional access to its app and magazine.
Benefits of Which?
Although you won’t be able to sign up for Which? as a business like you can with other platforms we’ve mentioned, it’s a good idea to keep a close eye on Which? for reviews of your, or your competitor’s, products.
- Which? reviews are completely impartial, and to prove it, it provides a video showing readers how it tests and reviews each product
- The site is 100% independent, refusing freebies from manufacturers to keep its content completely unbiased
- Which? prides itself on championing consumers, so its opinions and advice is widely trusted
Yelp
Founded in 2004, Yelp is a crowd-sourced review site for local businesses. Accessible online and via its app, it features listings for millions of companies, targeting customers locally.
Users can rate local businesses on their performance using a five-star scale, but Yelp also encourages long-form reviews. Rather than just giving one line saying, ‘great service’, for example, reviewers can go into great amounts of detail about their experiences.
Signing up as a user is completely free, and anyone can leave a review. It’s also free to sign up as a business and create a profile.
Here’s how to get started on Yelp:
- Claim your Yelp page. Enter your company’s name and create an account. You’ll then receive a code to verify your identity
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Next, optimise your page. Yelp offers lots of tools that can help you personalise your page to fit your brand. Make sure you catergorise your business correctly, use relevant keywords, write a detailed description, and add photos and videos to bring your page to life
Rather than verifying its reviews, Yelp uses an algorithm to detect any reviews that may be fake or malicious, but much like other sites, Yelp will only remove reviews if they go against its guidelines.
Benefits of Yelp
- Yelp is an accessible option. Anybody can sign up for a Yelp account, and leaving a review is easy, so you can expect to gather lots of customer feedback
- Yelp is known for its community of reviewers, with some of its members dedicated to the platform. Because of its committed users, you can expect to gather detailed feedback from those leaving reviews
TripAdvisor
With over 8 million tourism businesses listed and around 490 million new visitors every month, TripAdvisor is the largest travel platform in the world. Travelers rely on the site to find the best travel destinations, compare accommodation, and make bookings.
To make the most out of TripAdvisor, you should create and manage your business listings. Here’s how:
- Claim your business by searching for iton the directory. If it appears on the search results, simply click ‘Claim your business’
- If your business isn’t listed, you can request a listing instead
- Fill out all the information, including your personal details, your business information, your location on the map, and details for the listing, including a photo
- Stay active on the platform, keeping your listing up to date. You can log in to the Management Centre through the Owners page
With so many travel companies listed on the site, making your profile stand out is probably the biggest challenge on TripAdvisor. You’ll need to get to the top of the popularity index, which, according to TripAdvisor, ranks by quantity, quality, and review date.
Benefits of TripAdvisor
Businesses in the travel sector use Tripadvisor daily to get millions of eyes on their locations. Here’s how it could benefit you:
- Being on the site widens your reach, attracting and engaging travelers from all over the world
- With a TripAdvisor business account, you can encourage guests to take a closer look at your locations via your site, increasing direct bookings
- There are some features available to business account holders which allow them to market their locations better, improve their reputation and help them stand out from competitors
Foursquare
Foursquare is a location enabled service that allows users to ‘check in’ when they stop at a business - whether that’s a shop, club, a hair salon - any place listed on the platform. Users can earn points when checking in and completing various activities and can leave ratings and reviews on any business they visit.
The benefits of Foursquare
Foursquare is a lot more ‘playful’ than other sites on our list. However, the platform can offer some great opportunities for businesses that it features:
- Foursquare’s 55 million-strong user base is attracted to its playful nature, so businesses can take advantage of the gamification of the app. Brands can work deals and promotions into the gameplay to encourage more users to visit them and leave a review
- The app reaches real customers
- You’re probably already on Foursquare, and it’s likely that your customers are already having conversations about your business. Becoming engaged with the app can help you take control of the listing, and guide those conversations
Feefo
Feefo is different to most review platforms. To make sure that all feedback is genuine, Feefo clients only ask verified customers who have used the business to give feedback. This means that the insight collected by Feefo clients relates to real experiences - whether good or bad.
Feefo gives clients the tools to collect customer reviews with ease - whether that’s by sending a feedback request email, an SMS, or a customer survey. Clients can then manage all their feedback within the Feefo Hub, where they can read and respond to reviews, identify trends and access reports.
Unlike other sites, you can’t just create an account and leave a review. Feefo sends out personal feedback requests on behalf of businesses, and if the company is collecting reviews for public use, publishes the review on the business’s Feefo page, and sometimes on their own site too.
Feefo will not take down a review just because it’s negative, but there are some regulations when it comes to the feedback we publish. Feefo will remove a review if:
- The reviewer uses bad language
- The content is offensive
- The content is litigious
- There’s no reference (e.g.
- The review is false
Benefits of Feefo
Feefo is about collecting customer reviews and loads more besides. Feefo offers a wide range of tools that can boost traffic, improve brand reputation and help you learn about your customers.
- Feefo has features which allow you to completely tailor feedback requests to your customers, even scheduling them to arrive at a particular time of day. This can increase engagement and improve your response rates
- Feefo’s partnership with Google means clients benefit from a boost in SEO rankings and click-through-rates
- Feefo’s range of feedback displays allow you to feature your ratings and reviews across your site, and you can even customise them to match your brand. Better still, they keep customers on your site, rather than directing them elsewhere to read your feedback
- You can easily share Feefo reviews across social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest to drive customer trust
- The Feefo Hub supports you to get the maximum insight possible from your customer feedback - whether that’s uncovering key themes in your reviews, or creating custom reports
Start collecting customer reviews
Customer reviews are key to understanding why people are using your business, and what you can do to improve their experience with you. Whichever platform you choose, make sure your feedback is:
- Genuine, from real customers
- Collected from every stage of the customer journey
- A true representation - the good and the bad
