5 Myths About Customer Reviews and the Wild Web

The web, as we’ve been told, is the Wild West.

Anything goes. Villains can terrorize freely without showing their face; they post scathing anonymous reviews on Yelp, they troll forums, and they blast brands and products on Twitter.

So why would you let them have their say on your site? You’d be setting yourself up for the web equivalent of a showdown at the O.K. Corral. Right? 

Maybe not, according to Conor O’Neill, CEO of LouderVoice, a company that helps publishers incorporate customer reviews on their websites.

Conor says this kind of thinking is one of the many reasons why content publishers may be gun shy when it comes to allowing people to post reviews on their own website. He’s heard all the fears before and he’s here to put the myths about customer reviews to rest:

Myth #1: I don’t want to allow people to say something bad on my own site. Sounds like a risk with little or no reward to me.

The first thing everyone latches on to when customer reviews are mentioned to them is the perceived problem of negative reviews. We always like to highlight a few truths around this:

• More than 80% of reviews are positive. Globally. In every vertical! Average scores are 4.3+ across the board. In other words, the “problem” is over-stated.

• Customers expect to see some negative reviews. It shows authenticity and trustworthiness. Several bad reviews along with positive ones have been proven time and again to actually increase sales.

• Businesses sometimes forget that most people have good judgement. They can spot trolls, unreasonable people or fake negativity very easily.

• Negative reviews are an opportunity to show how good your customer service is. Be seen to deal with issues and you’ll sell more overall.

• Problem products and problem service can often be identified by customer reviews faster than any other means. There are very few businesses out there who want to sell poor products or give bad service.

• People tend to be far more moderate in their language on your own site than when they are semi-anonymous on some third-party hub. Particularly if your reviews setup only allows verified customers to post reviews.

If you don’t let people have their say on your site, they’ll do it somewhere else, where you have far less ability to deal with any issues.

Myth #2: User generated content will distract people from the copy I want them to read – my product descriptions. User reviews will ultimately hurt my revenue by distracting readers and potentially talking another user out of spending money with me.

Customer reviews are an absolute goldmine of useful information on websites. In many cases it’s where potential customers go first when evaluating a product. The days of “controlling the message” are over. Your customers want to help you, let them.

A reasonable concern that businesses have is around reviews sending customers elsewhere. It is perfectly acceptable for businesses to set in their Terms and Conditions that reviews should not mention competitor products/sites or pricing. The reviews should be about the products.

Myth #3: I barely have enough time to manage my own web content, moderating and policing user reviews is just not something I’ve got time to do.

Businesses tend to over-estimate how many customer reviews they will get. They assume everyone will write reviews and they will be overwhelmed. In most cases you will see up to a 10% response rate from the customers you ask for reviews. The approval process is literally a couple of minutes each day with potentially some escalation to customer support if you do spot a problem review. If you are an extremely high volume site, then most customer reviews solutions providers offer moderation services too.

Myth #4: I don’t want to give people a platform for negativity. So, no customer reviews for me.

Unless you have a fundamental problem in specific products or your overall service then negativity will never be a major issue for you. If you don’t provide the platform for people to talk about you, then some other site will.

Myth #5: Everybody knows that customer reviews are only written by 2 types of people: marketers who are faking them, and trolls with an axe to grind. Because of this, nobody trusts them or reads them anyway.

All recent industry analysis has shown that despite trolls and fake positive reviews, a huge majority of customers use and trust reviews (92%). This is back to the point around judgement. Customers aren’t fools, they can separate the wheat from the chaff. No-one reads one solitary review and makes a purchasing decision based on that. But they will buy the product on a site with reviews as opposed to another site selling the same item but without reviews. There is research showing that this helps alleviate pricing pressure too.

It can be a major emotional challenge for businesses, particularly small businesses, to allow people to say anything negative on their own site, no matter how gentle the criticism. They take it very personally. When we explain the benefits (as above), we almost always win them over.

It’s very simple. Let your customers do the selling for you on your site. In addition, if you use a solution with social integrations then your customers can be your marketers too.

The biggest myth about customer reviews is that you have something to fear.

Conor O’Neill is CEO of LouderVoice which powers Social Commerce using Reviews.

He specializes in building things, whether it’s businesses, technology, community or events. He previously worked in senior management roles with Integral Design, Xilinx, EMC and McAfee and has co-founded two start-ups.

He doesn’t have any hobbies due to five children and a start-up. But if he did have any free time, he’d try running more in his new Vibram FiveFingers.
Conor is also heavily involved in the Irish start-up community through co-editing Web2Ireland.org, running Ireland’s first BarCamp, founding Ireland’s most successful OpenCoffee and coordinating Facebook Developer Garages.