Reviews and testimonials have an essential role in your business since they represent the honest opinions of your customers. This power can be so huge that it may change your company’s approach to how you do business. Now, I’m sure many questions popped up in your head when reading this claim. Let’s look at nine companies that have been impacted by customer reviews and see if we can address some of those questions.
Amazon
There’s no business more defined by customer reviews than Amazon. Star ratings, written or video testimonials, and verifications of purchase, Amazon’s website provides all of these for you. As the “market of the Internet,” Amazon has such an abundance of reviews every month (tens of thousands) that they can improve their website, logistics and policy based on them. A good example was when, in the early days, the average rating of new reviews went down from 4.2 to 3.5 in three years. So, they decided to change things on their website, and the new average rating shot up to 4.0 in less than two years.
Customer reviews have not been available on Facebook for a long time. The “blue giant” recognized the power of community in this aspect as well and offered the opportunity for people to leave reviews on a company’s page, where it’s allowed. Facebook pays exceptional attention to customer reviews for local businesses since you can always see them on a business page if it’s allowed. Thanks to this move, Facebook became the fastest-growing review platform and has morphed into an all-in-one platform, trying to keep users engaged for as many hours as possible.
Google Seller Ratings has been around for several years but used only by retail/e-commerce advertisers. However, in the last few years, advertisers in other industries took advantage of Google Seller Ratings and reaped the benefit of increased click-thru rates. Now, Google Seller Ratings is one of the fastest-growing customer reviews services on the Internet, helping the SEOs of thousands of companies.
AliExpress
As one of the most popular websites in e-commerce, AliExpress benefits from customer reviews at least as much as Amazon. Their rating system is similar to their big competitor but with tiny differences. At Ali, you can also see how many people claimed their guarantee, which is a bottleneck point of AliExpress since there’s a significant number of faulty products shipped to the customers.
eBay
Although there is an opportunity on eBay to leave customer reviews, and it’s surely one of the main reasons why it’s so popular to buy anything on the Internet, we bet that they will have to change their policy regarding customer reviews soon. On eBay, customer reviews are not as simple to leave or view like on AliExpress and Amazon. Maybe this is a reason why more and more people turn to eBay’s competitors.
HubSpot
As the giant of online marketing, HubSpot has a tremendous number of reviews from their clients, and they are not afraid to use them. They perfectly applied them in their marketing efforts: After getting the first few ones from bigger companies, they leveraged their power to attract new high-paying clients. We give them an A+ for this great performance!
Airbnb
You wouldn’t sleep just anywhere, right? And you are not the only person who thinks like this. One of the worst surprises is when you step into the place where you want to stay on your dream vacation and it lets you down, or even shocks you! Recognizing this, Airbnb has one of the most dependable customer review systems. This is a crucial part of the room-renting business. It’s still true, even if it was an issue at Airbnb a few years ago.
Barnes & Noble
The American bookstore’s online store provides customer review opportunities similar to Amazon and AliExpress. Star ratings, written reviews, and social media integrations. Their strategy is also really similar, using the power of community and social proof. As a side note, it would be great to read testimonials with the names of reviewers (more credibility).
Upwork
Upwork is the biggest freelance platform at the moment, with 14 million users in 80 countries. It was established in 2015 from the merge of Elance and o-Desk. As a B2B platform, it’s a cardinal point for business owners to pick the most appropriate and trustworthy freelancers. Testimonials are a great way to show dependability. They’ve had a long evolution on Upwork and its predecessor websites. Now freelancers can even attach files and websites to their testimonials in addition to the regular rating system and written reviews.
As you can see, the biggest online companies use the power of online customer reviews to beat their competition, and they keep improving so they can stay ahead. Do you already use customer reviews software, such as Wiremo?
