Fostering Trust Through Customer Reviews

If customers don’t trust your business, they will not buy from you.  You can build the best products and services in the world and make all right promises but if they will be reluctant to risk buying from you. Building trust should be a priority in growing your business.

An incredibly powerful way to build trust is to ask for customer reviews. Allowing customers to leave reviews sends a clear message that you value your customer’s opinions and wish to be transparent in your relationship with them. In other words – you are a company with nothing to hide and addressing your customer needs is genuinely important to you. It also reflects a high level of confidence in your products and services, which in turn eases their minds when deciding between you or your competitors.

The mistake that many businesses make is that they would rather not hear what customers have to say just in case it’s bad news and/or it will create extra work on top of their already busy workload. The issue with this approach is that, if customers are dissatisfied with your products and services they will be likely to share their negative experiences and you will have no idea what they are saying and no opportunity to address their issues or share your side of the story. Worst case, they will be ‘keyboard warriors’, best case, they tell a few friends. The net result is the same, they will erode trust in your business.

A far better approach is to encourage your customers to leave feedback and provide them with a simple and convenient way for them to do that. You can then monitor this closely and respond according to protect and grow trust in your business.