Unleashing the Power of Online Reviews

9 Jun, 2023

Utilising online reviews can revolutionise your understanding of customer satisfaction and empower you to make data-driven decisions that will enhance your products, services, and overall customer experience.  You can even save and use these reviews as part of your evidence if you have ISO 9001. 

How Online Reviews Support Performance Evaluation

Here are five ways online reviews can support your business performance evaluation:

1. Customer Feedback

Online reviews provide direct feedback from your customers regarding their experiences with your business.  These reviews can highlight both positive and negative aspects of the customer journey, including product quality, service satisfaction and overall experience.  This will give you an understanding of how you’ve performed and identify key areas of improvement. 

2. Boost Your Reputation

Online reviews have a significant influence over potential customers.  Positive reviews will enhance your business’s reputation, build trust, and attract new customers.  Whilst negative reviews can deter some customers, they can alert you to potential issues and provide an opportunity for you to address these promptly.  Also, managing and responding to reviews (both good and bad) demonstrates a commitment to customer satisfaction and can ease the impact of negative feedback. 

3. Performance Metrics

Online reviews often come with rating systems such as star ratings or numerical scores.  This provides tangible benchmarks for evaluating your performance over time and can be used to track your average rating and set improvement goals.   

4. Competitor Analysis

Analysing competitor reviews provides invaluable insights into their strengths and weaknesses.  Comparing their performance to yours will help you identify both the opportunities and threats to your business, ensuring you to stay one step ahead of the competition. 

5. Aids Continuous Improvement

Trends in online reviews can help you identify recurring issues, address concerns, and implement changes to enhance your performance.  This will ultimately ensure customer satisfaction stays at the heart of what you do. 

Which online review platform is right for you?

There are loads of different platforms available for gathering online reviews including Facebook, Feefo and Trustpilot to name but a few.  Which one you use is dependent on your business and your target audience, but most can benefit from Google Reviews:

1. It’s free and easy to use for both businesses and their customers. 
2. Google is the most widely used search engine worldwide, processing billions of searches daily! Their current market share for desktop searches is 85% and 96% for mobile searches*. 
3. With those billions of searches in mind, Google Reviews will also help with your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) – basically, what gets you to the top of Google! This is especially useful when competing to appear in local search results.
4. Your reviews are predominately placed in search results and Google Maps making them highly visible to potential customers, therefore increasing the likelihood of your business being discovered.
5. Google Reviews is the most used and trusted platform for reviews**. 

If you’re interested, here’s how you can start getting Google Reviews today.  We’ll also be happy to leave you a review, just let your account manager know. 

*Statistics from 2023 SEM and SEO Statistics: https://www.smartinsights.com/search-engine-marketing/search-engine-statistics/
**According to the Local Consumer Review Survey 2023: https://www.brightlocal.com/research/local-consumer-review-survey/