As more product information becomes available online, it can be difficult for buyers to determine what’s relevant and needed to make important purchase decisions. How can we guide distracted buyers to the software solutions that will best fit their business needs? Customer reviews are a great place to start.
 

The key to high-value customer reviews: Authenticity

Customer reviews offer a brief, peer-provided summary of a product and help buyers narrow their options. Individually, reviews act as candid consumer feedback related to real-world use, free from marketing hype. Collectively, they yield high-level insight that helps buyers quickly filter the massive number of product options. Aside from creating a helpful experience for buyers, you can use reviews to learn more about your customers, identify product gaps, build promotional and social media campaigns, and run competitor analysis.

The caveat to those benefits is that reviews lose their value if they aren’t legitimate. Recent reports exposing paid networks of reviewers, or of suppliers padding third-party profiles with fake reviews, place review sites and programs in doubt and undermine the positive impact of authentic reviews and customer feedback.

Carefully select a reviews platform or review site

Maintain a reputable presence online and reap the benefits of valid customer feedback by hosting your reviews on a credible third-party site. Ensure that platform has a dedicated team of investigators who manually review each and every online customer review submitted. The review site should safeguard against business reviews that violate an established set of guidelines and it should take a systematic approach to validate each reviewer’s identity.

At Gartner Digital Markets, we’ve found that getting your first review can impact product profile pageviews by more than 80% — while getting to 10 or more reviews can lead to 3x more pageviews. As a PPC client, generating 10 reviews can double average click through rates.

A negative review beats a fake review 100% of the time

Don’t let the fear of negative customer feedback encourage you to collect falsified positive reviews. Even a negative review can provide an opportunity to identify, and resolve, customer challenges before they escalate. Negative reviews serve as a valuable social proof, and increase buyer perception of the authenticity of your reviews collectively, as well as your business. Publicly respond to feedback left in a negative review as an opportunity to highlight the quality of your team’s customer service. Prioritize legitimate online review collection over positive reviews to guide better-informed, qualified leads — with a higher chance of conversion — to your site.

Learn more about how to ensure the overall quality of your customer reviews, and all that goes into a high-quality, authentic review with our “Reviews Quality Comes First” white paper.
 

Ryan Kent
Ryan Kent is the Director of Reviews Operations for Gartner Digital Markets. Ryan helped create, implement and scale Digital Markets’ Reviews Quality Assurance and Compliance programs. When he’s not working on improving the quality of our reviews, he and his wife have their hands full of kids, cats and dogs! Connect with Ryan on LinkedIn.