We all love to receive a positive review, and we’ve spoken often about the incredible benefits reviews can give to your business in terms of improving your SEO, providing social proof, building trust between you and your customers/potential customers – but can you use reviews for anything else?
What about using reviews to spot the positive and negative trends within your business and using this information as a tool to further improve your business?
Frequent Similar Comments
For instance, several of your reviews may mention your opening hours, or how your staff answer the phone, or an annoyance with a specific aspect of your product/service. Sometimes, a specific person in the business will be mentioned a lot, and this can allow you to give praise where praise is due and enable you to make sure that you’re playing to your strengths. It’s therefore important to read every single review and start to pull out the keywords! This feedback is giving you a fabulous opportunity to explore the issue raised and see how you can fix it, thereby further improving your service and, at the same time, visibly proving that you listen to and respond to your reviews and the positives and negatives within them.
Let’s not forget that customers are looking for responsive companies. By addressing the review comments left and showing you’re working hard to bring about a resolution, you are being just that – responsive!
Requesting Reviews
You can actually have a hand in making sure that your customers let you know which parts of your product/service they love, and which they think could be improved. When you’re requesting reviews, ask your customers outright to mention the key things that made them want to write the review. Is it your service? Is it a particular person in the person? Or is it something more niche that you wouldn’t have otherwise noticed was a massive strength?
Top Performing Locations
If you’re a multi-location business reviews can really help by showing you which locations are performing the best/worst. By collecting location level reviews each of your business locations will have their own review count and rating which can be compared directly against your other locations within a Trustist account. The reviews collected can be attributed back to individual locations and, again, this data is worth it’s weight in gold because now you’re able to follow the review trail back and find out why certain locations are receiving glowing reviews and others quite frankly…aren’t.
Once you’ve established the trend you can address the issue(s) which then gives you the opportunity to increase business at any ‘weaker’ locations. The positive impact that can have on your business as a whole cannot be underestimated.
So, there you have it! Two ways you can use reviews to find positive and negative trends within your business!