You’ve made an important step toward taking control of your online reputation: you’ve joined Trustpilot. You’re starting to see the reviews coming in from your customers, and you’re reading about how well you’re serving them. Now what do you do?
Should you answer every review? Just the positive ones? Just the negative ones? Don’t worry. There are just two key principles to practice and master first. Get these right, and you can build other practices on top of them.
1. Respond to Reviews
You definitely need to respond to reviews. That’s a big part of what Trustpilot reviews are for. Customer reviews and your responses create an online conversation that gets picked up by search engines. It creates online real estate where prospects and returning customers get to know you better.
Writing back to both negative and positive reviews gives you some hidden benefits, such as:
Showing that your organization is committed to customer service and is great at it
Making customers who usually don’t get noticed feel good when you take the time to leave feedback
Starting a conversation with customers that they’ll continue with you in the future in many different ways
Making customers more loyal to your brand than to another that doesn’t respond to their reviews
2. Respond in the Right Way
At Trustpilot, we’ve studied the best organizations that respond to reviews, and we’ve advised many of them. We can tell you this: You don’t get successful through just any response, but by strategic, efficient, professional, and courteous responses. Remember these tips.
Respond Strategically
Take a moment before each response to think about how it fits your strategy. How can your response improve your business and bring in more customers? Remember that it costs between 4 to 10 times more to prospect for and find a new customer than to just take care of your existing customers. So, use your response as a way to hold onto a customer and solve his or her problems.
Stay Efficient
If you or one of your employees used Trustpilot reviews to write an online conversation thread to every customer, you’d never get anything else done.
Write just one response to every customer — no more and no less. If a customer needs a longer conversation, give them another way to contact you and receive quality customer service.
Maintain Your Professionalism
Some people are rude, and that’s especially true in online culture. You won’t change them by acting rude or defensive yourself. And in fact, unprofessional behavior can be seen by other prospects and customers, who can be turned off by it.
The previous examples we shared above are the right way to do it, but the made-up example below is the wrong way to respond.
Another way to be professional is to keep the customer’s private information confidential. If a full answer would give away too much specific information about the customer, just leave a response that directs him or her to a private message, promising to resolve his or her concern there. Show your professionalism while protecting this customer’s identity.
Use Your Trustpilot Account for Good
Show empathy and professionalism to everyone who leaves you a review. Make that commitment now, and stick to it no matter how rude someone might act. Your responses can create a positive buying environment for future transactions and build satisfying relationships with your customers.
Get a free guide on how to be more skilled at responding to reviews, especially negative ones, with Trustpilot. Download the report now.
