How to gets customer reviews to boost retail sales
Tips to improve profit margins
February 22, 2021
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March 9, 2021Customer reviews can affect your retail business in multiple ways. When customers give online reviews of products and services, they may affect prospective customers’ purchase behavior. They may also contribute to validating your products or services, developing credibility for your company, or building your brand reputation.
Furthermore, when customers do a local search, the first point of engagement with the company’s website is reading customer feedback to make a quick decision on whether to move ahead with the visit or not. Positive product reviews may also improve website traffic.
Therefore, businesses must focus on obtaining customer reviews – be it good or bad. Another requirement for companies is to respond to those customer reviews, even if not immediately, but maximum within a week.
If we consider the customers’ perspective, if they are extremely satisfied or have complaints with the purchase, they give service reviews or product reviews online or on the face, depending on the engagement. However, it is the company’s right to ask for customer feedback, and customers have the right to give or not give reviews.
The biggest question running in companies’ minds is getting customer reviews and influencing or convincing the customers to write product reviews. Read on further for tips and tricks that can help you get customer reviews to boost retail sales.
The best trick is to just ask for customer reviews
Do not think much; just ask for customer reviews. It is just a simple question or a request for product feedback or service reviews. You can directly ask them ‘How did we do?” or “Got two minutes to share your shopping experience with us?” or request them, saying, “We would love to hear your opinion on our product/service!”
This option is more relevant for restaurants or pop-up food stalls, where you can keep a customized notepad or give an attractively designed feedback sheet along with the bill for the customer to fill in.
Ask for product feedback immediately after the product purchase or service completion
The best strategy to get customer reviews is to ask for them straightway after billing them from the point of sale. This is when customers are still thinking about the product or service they bought from you, and they are excited about the purchase.
The company and the product or service are still fresh in customers’ minds, and therefore, they will be better able to tell you something about it. Once the time passes, either the customers forget about it, are not interested in talking about it, or are so busy in their daily lives that it is difficult for them to write product feedback.
Ask for customer reviews at the right moment of the buyer’s journey of engagement with the company
Buyer goes through different stages of engagement with your company in their journey. You have to identify the right moment when you can ask for customer reviews so that the mood does not reflect on the reviews written. Specifically, when they have complained about your product or service on a social media post, please do not ask for a review.
For a product that is consumed immediately, like a cake, asking for product feedback after a month does not make sense. The strategic
moments of a customer’s journey when you can ask for customer feedback are:
- After they are happy with the purchase
- After they write something good about your company in a social media post and tag you, there
- If another customer comes to you with the reference of an existing customer, you must ask for online reviews from the existing customer
- When they return to your store for another product or order the same
- When they are browsing your products and services on your website
Ask for customer reviews when you have resolved a client’s problem or addressed a doubt with which they are satisfied
When you have a successful customer service instance, it is a good time to ask for feedback. At such a time, the customer is satisfied with the help he/she got from the company. As he/she is happy and contented with the company’s support, there are higher chances of positive service reviews.
These reviews may have the story of the customer’s complaint with the company and how the latter resolved it efficiently, which is a good display of your company’s values of professionalism and care for customers.
Give customers some incentives for writing online reviews
Do not bribe them for writing a positive review. Just motivate them to make efforts to write product feedback. It may be a positive review or a negative one. You can attract them to write customer reviews through incentives such as a review contest, wherein if they write a review, they become eligible to participate in a contest with multiple prizes or gifts.
Customized surveys are a good way to ask for customer reviews
Some customers find it difficult to gather words to write a review or be lazy enough to type the entire experience. They can just say ‘It was good’ or ‘The experience was bad’ with no details in the feedback. In such cases, it is wise for companies to create a customized survey – either on paper or online surveys.
The benefit to you is you can ask as many or as few questions as possible for the ease of your customers and the details you are looking for. It is
good to have a rating, ranking, Yes-No, or multiple-choice questions rather than requesting descriptive answers to such surveys. You can integrate these survey links on your website page or email marketing campaigns, or social media posts for better accessibility to the customers.
Hold your employees and customer services team accountable for obtaining more customer reviews
The importance of customer reviews to your employees is the same as to the company. Your employees must understand this and include it as a part of their job description. Your employees must understand the best ways to ask for customer reviews, tell them about the different channels for giving feedback, and thank them for the same.
This trick may also work for employees in some cases, when the customers mention an employee’s name in a positive review, as it may be added to the employee’s appraisal.
Thank the customers for giving product reviews
Saying ‘thank you’ to the people who give online reviews of your products and services makes them feel good about it. Doing it as and when the customer posts the feedback on the website or social media channel portrays you as a responsible company that values the customer reviews and uses them for improvement purposes.
It helps build a personal relationship between the customer and the company, as they know their opinions matter to the company. The potential customers also find the response from the company as a mark of a customer-centric company, thereby converting them to customers.
Furthermore, companies can use it as a way to improve their SEO rankings. This is possible by including relevant keywords in your response to the customer reviews.
In Sum
Use the above tricks to get customer reviews. With more customer reviews, your online reputation improves, and people start having more trust in your brand. These reviews will make you happy. However, for you to become happy, you have to make your customers happy by providing them the best experience of purchase or shopping with you. Once they are satisfied with your brand, your product, or your service, the customer reviews and feedback will soon follow.
