Customer reviews can have a substantial impact on your business’ brand equity, which can also translate to positive growth and return sales. According to market research by BrightLocal, 88 percent of customers trust in online reviews as they would a personal recommendation.
Unfortunately, while such user-generated content is an excellent way to establish trust and encourage conversions, it can also have unintended side effects. For example, your feedback mechanism can get flooded by fake or inaccurate reviews about your products or services. This can be done either by competitors, trolls, hackers, or simply users who want to take advantage of loopholes in your system.
Case in point: even major e-commerce players such as Amazon or Alibaba are not immune from fake reviews. These can badly distort rankings, ratings, and opinions, which can then negatively impact the trust factor that user reviews are supposed to impart. In addition, any notion that you might be using non-organic content into your review system (whether willfully or not) might result in your SEO taking a bad hit.
The solution here would be to optimize your review system in order to put the focus back where it belongs: the user. The key is to ensure an excellent user experience, stay balanced, and to take advantage of social connections, thereby increasing the likelihood that a prospective customer will trust an online review.
Tip #1: Curate the User Experience
Facilitating the product or service review process is not as simple as it looks, since it requires the perfect timing and context in order to bring out the most honest including constructive review from end-users.
A study conducted by the Spiegel Research Center explains that customers are much more likely to leave authentic, positive reviews when the system prompts them to do so. The reason is fairly simple: when a customer is upset with a product or service, they naturally feel inclined to leave a negative review immediately. If they are satisfied, however, the need to contribute positive feedback isn’t as strong.
