Customer reviews are an invaluable asset for businesses both online and offline, providing a wealth of information about products, services, experiences and customer satisfaction.
As businesses strive to offer the best customer experience, customer reviews can help them to identify the areas that they excel at, while also highlighting areas that would benefit from improvement.
What is a customer review?
A customer review is a written feedback from a customer, detailing their personal account of a product, service or experience that they have had. Customer reviews are often found on third-party websites, such as Google My Business, Yelp, Trustpilot or Amazon, although they can also appear on a business’ own website. Depending on the review platform, customer reviews can include ratings (on a scale of one to five stars or a similar system) as well as written feedback.
Why are customer reviews important?
Customer reviews can be invaluable to a business, providing them with first-hand feedback from their customers. Having customer reviews online can also improve a business’ online presence; they can provide a business with the trust signals needed to encourage potential customers to to purchase products or services, as well as helping to raise a businesses’ visibility in search engine listings.
For customers, reviews are useful for learning about a business, product or service before making a purchase. People naturally research before buying, and reviews give customers an insight into the experiences of existing customers so they can make a more educated decision about which product or service to purchase.
In terms of best practices for business, customer reviews should be actively sought and worked upon, with particular focus on the following points.
1. Monitoring
To make the most of customer reviews, businesses should ensure that they have a system in place to allow them to keep on top of them. This could be as simple as subscribing to notifications on different customer review platforms or using a review monitoring service.
2. Responding
Where possible, it is important to acknowledge customer reviews and respond to them. Negative customer reviews should definitely be responded to in order to understand the customer’s point of view and help to put right any issues. In addition, responding to positive reviews will show customers that their feedback is valued.
3. Following up
To ensure customers keep coming back, customer reviews should be followed up on. If customers are complaining or have suggestions, businesses should act on any information they can gather to improve their services, customer experience or products.
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4. Solicitation
In order to have customer reviews, businesses should also actively seek them, either through customer surveys or by asking for reviews on review websites.
5. Demonstrating success
Using customer reviews to showcase customer success is an effective way of modifying customer behaviour who may be looking for similar success and giving potential customers reassurance that products or services are effective.
6. Regularly reviewing
Over time, customer reviews will accumulate, and often the most useful feedback can be uncovered when reviews are reviewed regularly. The best results can be found when this process is undertaken on a quarterly basis.
7. Checking accuracy
Accuracy and reliability of reviews should be checked regularly, as customer reviews may contain critical problems that were not previously noticed.
8. Understanding the customer
Businesses should aim to understand the customers’ feelings and needs in reviews to ensure that services and products are tailored to their needs.
9. Acting on feedback
To ensure customers keep coming back, businesses should act upon customer feedback, making changes where needed to ensure a better customer experience.
10. Investing in developing customer reviews
Investing time and energy in developing customer reviews can help to ensure that customers have a positive experience.