Thousands of businesses worldwide are advertising their services to the online world, with this comes the ability to expand at rapid rates as businesses are able to sell their products and services to a wider audience. Though expanding is a good thing, you are also leaving yourself open to more bad feedback since the customer base will be astronomically higher, dealing with customer complaints gets a lot harder.
61% of online customers read online reviews before making a buying decision.
Why Online Feedback Is So Important
There are literally billions of reviews online ranging from small items such as kitchen utensils up to high ticket items such as cars and boats, even homes! 61% of customers now read other customer reviews before buying the item, this is where feedback becomes critical, even one bad piece of feedback could cripple a business and leave it thousands out of pocket as consumers trust one another.
This is why feedback is so important, if you are new to the online world and have only just made the switch with your business there are a couple of things you can do;
- Source out trusted bloggers who are well known in your industry, give them free products or a trial of your service and they may write a review on their blog which could also generate sales as well as a good piece of feedback to link to off your website.
- Call old customers and new ones to see if they wouldn’t mind logging on to place a good review of their thoughts about you, your company and your service or product.
Don’t Believe Me? Here Are Some More Statistics!
- 50 or more reviews per product or service could mean a 4.6% increase in conversion sales.
- 63% of customers are more likely to make a sale from a website which has user reviews from previous customers.
- Website visitors who interact with questions and answers from old customers are 105% more likely to purchase.
- Customer reviews are trusted a lot more than their descriptions (Nearly 12 times more).
- Reviews create on average 18% uplift in sales.
Dealing With Negative Feedback
Dealing with the negative feedback is a very tricky thing to do, once you have a bad review you must deal with it immediately as this could snowball and the bad reviews will start flying. The first thing to do would be to contact the customer to see if the problem can be rectified in any way.
If you cannot contact the customer via phone or internet, the next thing to do is to reply to the negative comment online. Be polite, respectful and try to consider it from their point of view. Never ask them to remove the comment as other consumers will see the negativity and see you attempting to rectify the problem, yes negative feedback is bad, but when they see you are making the effort it will be a good thing.