Customer Service

If you have not already done so, you may want to consider offering your customers the opportunity to provide feedback on your products. Why? It turns out that consumers are relying more and more heavily on online customer reviews to guide their purchasing decisions.

Opinion Research Company, a leading marketing research organization in the United States, conducted a survey of Internet purchasers and learned that sixty-one percent of purchasers consulted online customer reviews as they were making product or service selections. Over eighty-three percent of respondents said that those reviews had at least some influence over which products and services they purchased.

Interestingly, even though a large majority of people used online customer reviews, the respondents revealed that only about thirty-two percent had actually posted their own reviews online. Consumers tend to consult online customer reviews when purchasing travel/recreation/leisure services, electronic goods, household products, clothing, automotive goods, personal care items and food products.

Does it sound risky to open your company up to this kind of commentary? Okay, then you need a reality check. The truth is that even if customers are not posting their feelings on your site, they may well be discussing their opinions about your products on blogs that you do not know about. So, there is value in providing a controlled forum for those opinions in a venue that you can access and respond to if necessary.

Naturally, online reviews will be less harrowing as a strategy if you can feel confident that the reviews will be mostly good. If you are not confident that your customers will praise your product, your price and your customer service, you will need to do some repair work before you begin allowing customers to voice their opinions (and lets face it, this is work that you need to do in any case if you expect to be successful).

There are several ways that you can guide online reviews to be most helpful to you. For example, you can provide commentary space but add rating questions that include areas where you know you excel such as price, delivery time, customer service response and so on.

You can also suggest the kinds of responses that people might make by setting up a framework such as asking customers for tips on uses for your products. For example, if you sell cake decorating supplies, you might ask how not only how well they worked but what kind of cake decorating project they had been used for. In that way, the reader gets not only a review but good content that may inspire a purchase. In this particular example, offering the option to upload an image makes sense as well.

Finally, if there is a negative review, you can always respond by saying you fixed the problem or that most people are happy … giving your customers the security of knowing that you are listening and responding and they can count on being a satisfied customer.

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