Almost everyone has had a bad experience with a business at some point in our lives. It is this trauma that erodes our trust, generally. It makes it that much harder to try out a new product or business because, we don’t know what it will be like. Will we get disappointed with the product? Will the service be bad? Is it worth the extra money? The unknown will always be a place to tread carefully.

New businesses know this, they experience this first hand. When you start a new business or launch a new product, you may have the best product in the world, or you may possess the best skills in the business, but to a prospective customer, you are a risk. This can prove to be a great hindrance to your success especially if you also lacking in the sales department

The solution for this issue is to sometimes give away your product or service, in exchange for an honest review. But there is a right way and wrong way to go about reviews.

But first, lets go over why reviews are important.

Good reviews cast you in a good light. You appear credible and trustworthy. If someone else had a good experience with you, then there is a high likelihood they will have a good experience with you.

Some tips on customer reviews

1: Detailed and specific

A good review is detailed and specific. It explains the nature and circumstances of your business dealings with an eye on the details. This is important because of the multi product or multi service nature of business. Instead of a review saying the companies products are ok, a review raving on the benefits of a specific product will work wonders for the product in the sales department. If each of your products and services all have specific glowing reviews, its much easier for a new customer to try you out.

2 : Real people

Don’t do fake reviews or cajole you friends and family to leave you reviews. Good reviews like a general’s medals should be earned. It is possible for your friends and family to give you good reviews, but you have to consider they may be doing it to avoid hurting your feelings. When a customer purchases based on these reviews and they get disappointed, it will really hurt your brand. In addition, it will be all the more difficult to dig yourself out of that hole and regain trust. If the reviews of one of your products was off, what about the rest of the products?

So how do you go about asking for reviews;

There is an art to this. You have to identity parts of the customer journey when your customer is in love with you. Business relationships like all relationships have ebbs and flows. Sometimes they love you, sometimes they want to throw you off a balcony. Always be conscious of the current state of relationship between you and your customer.

Ideally you should use tools such as trust pilot to add another level of trust to your reviews. Also, if you can get a well known individual or party to endorse your services or products, your brand will grow a theoretical “angels halo”. This will put you miles ahead of your competition.

Prepare for bad reviews

These are inevitable sometimes. Especially when you get big and quality control suffers. Even freelancers have this problem, sometimes you are a just not you, and this results in substandard work. Should this happen, the customer may leave a nasty review.

So how do you handle this?

You need to make it right with the customer. You need to follow up with the customer, have a chat on what went wrong and rectify. If the situation is not easily rectifiable, a refund or discount is in order. After you have done that, you should request the customer to modify their review to take into consideration your efforts to make things better.

It is really that simple.