Is this a clickbait title? Perhaps.
Consumers are 74% more likely to purchase from a business with positive online reviews, coupled with Trustpilot’s reach - it’s becoming a easy decision to manage your TrustScore.
Done successfully, there’ll be no shortage of customer feedback on your products and services, providing the following benefits:
Word of mouth advertising. Trustpilot’s 3 million reviews posted every month help provide social proof for consumers
Valuable insights on how to improve your product or service offering.
If you’d like to get insight on how TrustScore is calculated, this previous post is a great start. But in the post, I’d like to share three starting points on how to improve your TrustScore, these are:
- Priortise Customer Service
- Encourage customers to leave reviews
- Engage with feedback
Priortise Customer Service
The ‘Customer’ is often at the heart of most businesses, but take a look through TrustPilot and you’ll notice that customer service features heavily.
When I mention improving customer service, most brainstorm storm sessions rapidly jump to improving response times. While this can help, it has diminishing returns. If you take days to answer your customer queries, sure, try improve your response times. But if you’re responding within a few hours, decreasing your response time will probably bring little results.
I’m also not just talking about customer support tickets/emails - there are many ways to improve the customer service outside of just emails.
An example would be developing a help centre or FAQ page that ties in with your customer supprort. A more personalised example of this would be for an e-commerce store, when the store surfaces the expected shipping time to the customer to keep them up to date with their purchase.
Providing help through content can be a cost-effective way to not only minimise the time spent responding to customers, but improve the customer service of your business by answering customer’s questions before they need to ask.
Start simple with content and develop this over time. Undoubtedly, you will see savings and an increase in your TrustScore.
Encourage customers to leave reviews
As I uncovered in my previous post, TrustPilot priortises new reviews and gives less weight to older reviews. To hack the TrustScore, businesses should actively encourage customers to leave reviews.
New and frequent reviews will help keep your score fresh and overcome the exponential decay function TrustScore exhibits. There are many opportunities to ask your customer score, here are some opportune times to ask:
- Following a sale, or an upgrade. An upgrade in particular shows that your customer is happy with your service.
- After closing a customer support ticket or interaction.
Remember, there isn’t actually anything from stopping a customer from posting a review, but you can encourage positive reviews by promoting the platform to your customers.
Encouraging reviews not only helps keep your score fresh and accurate, it also helps enhance the social proof of your company by increasing the volume of reviews your company has.
Engage with feedback
You can’t control who leaves a review on your Trustpilot and attempting to censor the feedback breaches TrustPilot’s guidelines.
But you can and should still take control.
Responding and engaging to all feedback, positive or negative can reinforce your brand’s trustworthiness. In fact, companies who handle negative feedback well can actually turn the customer from being negative to being loyal.
On top of this, customer feedback is a great way to address misconceptions you may have about your customers and figure out what is and isn’t working.
The bottom line is, all customer feedback is good. How you handle customer feedback can not only enhance your business, but also enhance the score itself. Trustpilot is a relatively low-cost solution for collecting customer feedback and insight, while also acting as solid social proof for your marketing.