To see into the future of customer reviews we have to take a look at their present. Nowadays customer reviews are one of the most important decisions making factors. 9 out of 10 customers will read reviews about a given product or service before checking out.
The Present of Customer Reviews
In the digital world, we live in, it is a priority for a business to be present online. Every company has its website that includes customer testimonials. Most of them have social media pages and/or profiles, and they try to climb as high on Google search lists as they can.
At the end of the day, it’s not just the result of what they are trying to show about themselves, but how they look in the online space, and that includes online customer reviews.
As matters stand, almost 70% of customers are influenced by online reviews before making a purchasing decision. They simply won't buy a product without reviews. Almost 90% of them look at online reviews as they would look at personal recommendations. The way a company handles and displays online reviews can have a huge impact on businesses.
It is better to have lower rates on reviews than no reviews at all. People don’t trust companies that won’t let customers tell their positive or negative thoughts about their products.
The Future of Customer Reviews
Even Google encourages customers to write reviews on every purchase. So the first prediction for the future is that customer reviews will have an even bigger role when it comes to decisions. Another effort of the tech giant is to try to incorporate online customer reviews into search engine results pages. Thus the first lines will contain the most important attribute of a product: how other people rate it.
The biggest issues with customer reviews are:
- Often inaccurate.
- Can be faked.
- Are not always about the moment of the purchase.
Possible future solutions for these issues by Marcus Warner:
- Point of Purchase Surveys: Forget those irritating e-mails asking you to rate your experience when you have already left that site. In the near future, companies that really care about reviews will come up with ways to survey customers closer to the point of purchase.
- Language Analysis: Artificial intelligence is almost capable to decode the words we are using in the online space. We are really close to a point when machines can tell from the words we used if our review is generally positive or negative.
- Emotion Recognition: Facial recognition is fascinating and scary at the same time. But what if you just have to turn on your webcam instead of filling out a long and boring survey; and still, the company would know how you feel about their products.
- Customer Experience 3.0: UX and UI are so yesterday… CX is here and if the experts start to use it for post-sale situations, it can revolutionize how we see satisfaction and dissatisfaction.
- Independent Review Governing Bodies: When customers have an ever-growing influence on how their friends see different products it is time to legislate the review world. Companies need legal help, because – as you already know – one negative review can turn 30 customers back from purchase. And if that review was written with pure malice…
Everything can happen this way or totally different, but one thing is sure: customer reviews will be important in the future.
