A “good” service is simply not good enough to effectively compete!
Good service is almost certainly leaving revenue, market share and new customer opportunity on the table, untapped, and your company will simply not know any real supporting detail as to how much business impact has been lost.
Online reviews matter:
- 85% of people trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations (Bright local survey)
- 49% of consumers need at least a four-star rating before they choose to use a business
In other words, you expect potential customers who don’t already know a brand to increasingly go to review sites before they buy. Further, they will set a level they will not go below and that critical four-star is a threshold for many.
Problem
Many well-respected customer-centric brands are receiving a distorted picture of customer feedback and falling below the four-star threshold.On the face of it, John Lewis is a terrible brand with 65% of their customer reporting simply a bad service. At least John Lewis has a strong enough brand presence to offset the negative impact of poor review but there are plenty of lesser-known brands that don’t and simply can’t. 
The simple truth is that statistics in the wrong hands creates a distortion and one that both customer and business impact:
- Customers who are unhappy – and sometimes does not take a lot – will either directly or indirectly complain.
- Customers who are satisfied to reasonably happy may return, but other than that will do absolutely nothing.
Whether you like it or not reasonable to pretty good service is not enough to create a proactive positive review so “pretty good service” brands lose a business opportunity.
What do you do differently?
- First and foremost, find ways to make sure you get reviewed. Customers who don’t know you are less likely to buy if there are only a few reviews. If you have a few thousand reviews, even if many are indifferent, will create buying impetus.
- Secondly, make sure potential customers are completely transparent about the positives and negatives. Authenticity is critical. We all know companies like people are not perfect. We have found customers are more likely to buy from companies with a review score of 4.4 than that of 4.9 or 5.0 out of 5. An average review score 4.9 is simply not believable.
Is it really this simple? Create a mechanism to ensure people review, make sure they review transparently and then share the good, bad and simply indifferent.
- Your business performance will improve
- You will accelerate the acquisition of new customers
Ultimately – and this is the big one – people will trust you more. The most overlooked component in every sales transaction is TRUST – and here is a simple strategy to do exactly that.
Let your competition present they are better than you – customers will quickly wise up – if they trust you!
