Picking a new restaurant to try? It can help to check out some reviews to see what other people think, but how do you know which reviews are the right ones to look at, and what are some considerations that go into those reviews? This goes for restaurants, hotels, events, and pretty much any other kind of business.
More importantly, if you’re the business, how do you get people to leave you good reviews? Besides the most obvious answer of delivering a great product or service at a reasonable price, that is. Reviews can make or break a business, especially a small business that may not have a lot of ‘em, so it’s an important question.
Here are Five Fast Facts on getting better reviews for your business:
- ✌️ Two Flavors - Depending on which review site you use, it seems there are two main styles. The first is to simply ask for an overall rating of the customer’s experience. The second is to ask for a rating on various aspects of the experience. For example, if it’s a restaurant, they may ask for a separate rating on the food, the ambiance, the service, the wait time, and more.
- 📣 Human Nature - While you would think people like to complain about bad experiences, research shows that customers like to give higher ratings, likely because they want to be seen as being nice. They may feel compelled to share bad things that happen, though.
- 👍 Variables - There are a lot of variables that affect people and the reviews they leave, including device, platform, and existing reviews. Also, whether or not someone is having a bad day, and if they have a good haircut or not. But those are awfully hard to quantify in a survey.
- 👀 Well, Would Ya’ Look At That - The interesting thing about these two flavors is that the single overall rating tends to skew a bit higher, but when the customer has the chance to ding certain aspects specifically, they do so while still rating the overall experience high.
- 🤔 What To Make Of It - So, if you’re a business, what do you do with this info to help get better reviews and drive more business? It seems pretty clear that asking for ratings on specific aspects is a great idea - not only does it allow happy customers to share their favorites, but it also allows unhappy customers to focus the negatives on something other than the overall rating.
🔥Bottom line: It’s hard to draw a direct line between reviews and dollars spent, but there’s no way that great or poor reviews don’t have some kind of impact on the success of the business.
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