Rolling the dice by letting your customers post reviews on your site is a gamble many brands are inclined to pass on.
They figure the risk is not worth the potential reward. The juice is not worth the squeeze.
“What if they say something bad?”
“I don’t like the idea of losing control.”
“I have an Ex with an ax to grind and, quite frankly, I’m scared.”
But it turns out this fear is more imagined than real. There can be some tangible benefits to allowing customers to post reviews on your organization’s website.
There’s an expectation: Nine out of ten U.S. Internet users read product reviews. This growing demand for the ability to read what other consumers have to say about a product prior to purchase means organizations need to strongly consider providing this functionality on any section of their website where products are sold. In short, people value authenticity.
The pendulum is likely to swing toward purchasing: Reviews are more likely to influence consumers to buy than they are to deter buying, even if only by a slight margin. Online reviews help people shed anxiety about making a purchase and preemptively strike against buyer’s remorse by providing justification for the purchase at the point of transaction. Additionally, positive reviews have more credibility in the minds of consumers than negative reviews, which mitigates the risk allowing the ax-grinder a turn in the limelight.
Consumers are savvier than you may be giving them credit for: Thirty-five percent of people assume and account for potential bias in a given review and 57 percent of them only use reviews to corroborate research they’re already doing.
Would You Rather Have the Rowdy, Packed Bar or the Quiet, Lonely One?
One of the most-used arguments against allowing consumer reviews and chatter on a website is the mythological notion of controlling the conversation. Organizations are reluctant to provide a stage for potentially angry customers to speak their mind for fear of the damage that could be done to the brand.
This is equivalent to having a “no talking” rule at a bar. Sure, it’ll be free from people saying disparaging things and getting a little too rowdy, but it will also be absent from the noise of a ringing cash register.
People in today’s connected social media world expect to be able to have a say and are turned off when they don’t. Gone are the days of quietly slipping note cards into a suggestion box. These days, vocal consumers posting their opinions where everyone can see them.
Consumers with a chip on their shoulder are likely to say what they want regardless of you providing a forum. They’ll shop around for a place that allows them to behave how they’d like to.
At least if you let them speak by your water cooler, you have a chance to respond before a whisper turns into a scream.
[image: mkeefe]
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“Would You Rather Have the Rowdy, Packed Bar or the Quiet, Lonely One?” I sometimes wonder where you get all of these analogies, though they do a simple job of explaining things and making things much more clear.
At rowdy, packed bars, proverbially speaking of course. And thanks for your comment, I’m glad they make sense to someone…
Is that a JCS reference? If so, hats off to you!
Nicely done, Bill. I was going to put it 47 times in a row but that would have been too long for a headline.
Customer reviews matter a lot regardless of their sentiment. Not only to savvy consumers, who trust them more than advertisers or expert reviewers, but also to manufacturers, who use the Word of Mouth analysis for planning their product updates. Online retailers knew for a while that availability of representative number of customer reviews, created uplift in sales. Our company (Amplified Analytics) is focusing on aggregation and contextual analysis of the customer reviews to enable our business customers to “hear” clear signals of what is important to their customers and how important it is to them. In other words we quantify qualitative information to enable better product design and marketing.
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