Customer testimonials, a tool for improving external communication

Discover how customer testimonials are a tool for improving external communication

Customer testimonials have become an indispensable e-marketing tool. Indeed, your customers are your main influencers and can influence the growth of your business. On the one hand, customer testimonials give you a lot of feedback to improve your products. On the other hand, they can become a real selling point. But how to deal with bad reviews and control your reputation?

Customer feedback in your product improvement strategy

An acceleration of the “Customer Centric” strategy

Today, the customer is at the center of every company’s attention. Companies are increasingly adopting a “Customer Centric” strategy, which consists of placing the customer at the center of their objectives, listening to them, responding to their needs and ensuring maximum satisfaction. This particular attention is the result of one observation: customer satisfaction has become one of the main levers of growth.

This power relationship between companies and their customers has been growing for almost 15 years. In the past, companies focused on improving their product, without focusing on user feedback and negative reviews.

Nowadays, consumers have a lot of influence, through social networks, review sites, consumer associations… The sensitivity of end-buyers becomes a major concern for companies. We can observe this phenomenon on a large scale in relation to climate change. Companies are trying to adopt a more eco-responsible activity in order to better respond to their customers’ demands. This strategy becomes essential for the development of the company.

This principle is so strong that each company strives to reach the highest level of customer satisfaction. We can even talk about a real war between companies to offer the best service.

Customer feedback, at the heart of your quality approach

Word of mouth is going digital. Today it is possible to get all the information you want thanks to information technologies. In order to know the feedback of their customers, companies will have to collect the feedback of their customers. For this, there are two complementary methods:

• Conducting a customer satisfaction survey: this is the simplest and most effective method. It will allow you to collect a large number of opinions in record time, but also to ask the right questions to your customers. Generally, you will succeed in getting between 15 and 25% of returns among all your customers.
• Analyze all customer reviews on the internet. All reviews and online conversations have the advantage of being raw and spontaneous. They are most often negative reviews but not necessarily. You may also discover that some people recommend you. All this information is very valuable.

To do this, you can search for reviews on different organic review platforms, such as Google Maps or the B-Reputation business directory. Furthermore, in order to identify all the online conversations and articles that talk about you, crawling tools will allow you to detect conversations that talk about your brand. This is very useful to quantify and analyze word-of-mouth.

Customer testimonials, a powerful communication tool

Is it possible to control your brand image on the internet?

The majority of online reviews are the result of a bad experience. Unhappy customers are the first to speak out about their bad experience. This can be embarrassing for your brand image.

Here are some essential tips for trying to control online reviews:

• The best way to avoid this is to improve your services to avoid malcontents and limit negative testimonials about your brand. This work requires improving the quality of your products and services in the long run. This will allow you to build customer loyalty.
• Following a negative comment, it is necessary to answer to your customers to fix the situation, to compensate them… You will be able to ask them to withdraw the negative comment.
• Finally, to collect positive reviews on your company, we advise you to ask your customers to leave a review on your services. This is the best way to get your customers to leave a positive review on the internet. For example, the B-Reputation customer review solution allows you to send manual or automatic invitations to your customers to leave a positive review about your company.

Customer testimonials, a lever for communication and growth

According to a study by IFOP, nearly 9 out of 10 people look for reviews on the Internet before buying a product or service. Indeed, consumers want to get information from their peers to decide, by consulting online reviews. Have you ever checked the reviews that come up on search engines?

For your company, it is very important to show positive reviews about your business. Positive feedback from your users will help you grow.

You may not have known it, but customer reviews are widely used to promote a product and convince your prospects to trust you. According to a CMIT study in 2019, it is the most used content by BtoB marketing departments, before video and product documentation.

Beware of fake reviews, a common practice that can be summed up in two points:

• Companies, posting fake reviews on your site can be detrimental to you. This practice is prohibited in European commercial law and fines have already been applied. It is an unfair business practice.
• Consumers or competitors may want to harm you by posting false reviews on your company. This is very annoying, especially on widely used platforms like Google Maps. It is then very difficult to remove these reviews.

To avoid any controversy, you can use a trusted third party to authenticate real customer reviews. By doing so, consumers give proof of their relationship with companies. Similarly, companies post reviews that have been manually verified.