Benefits of online customer reviews for business
Online reviews arenât affecting consumer products and restaurants only. Nowadays, reviews are strongly impacting revenue for all types of businesses and professional service providers. Whether your business is a beauty salon, boutique, auto repair shop, doctor clinic or anything else, itâs important that you understand clearly the good impact of positive user reviews.
Online user reviews affect your consumers purchasing decisions. Furthermore, it affects your ranking in local search engines, and they impact which search results can actually get clicked on. That makes online reviews critical to your local SEO strategy as well as to the growth of your consumer base.
To understand the power of online user reviews, Just consider the following Harvard business research facts:
89% of consumers viewed online sources of product and service reviews as trustworthy, and another 80% have changed their minds about a purchase based solely on the negative reviews they read.
A one-star difference in a restaurant rating impacts revenue between 5% and 9%.
About 67% of consumers will read 6 reviews or less before they form an opinion about a given business.
Online reviews come with top 5 benefits to your business.
Each positive review posted online by one of your customer is a free advertising for your business. Itâs spread wide online for readers and potential customers, increasing their awareness of who you are, what you do and how awesome you do it.
Improved search engine results
Reviews can also affect results on search engines. Search engines such as Google take into account how many times your business name is mentioned in reviews. If you're mentioned often, you're more likely to appear higher in the search results.
Trusted peer recommendations
Researches show that customers generally trust other customer recommendations more than they trust advertising. Customers consider online reviews very credible when it comes to evaluating your business and making purchase decisions.
Some online reviews may report negative experiences, raise concerns or suggest enhancements related to your business. This is a great opportunity to reinforce your professional image representation by resolving a customer's problem and improving business processes. By responding publicly, you let other potential customers clearly understand you take their satisfaction seriously. Your customers will always have suggestions or improvements to make, which can be a free source of great ideas.
Get closer to your customers
Like all forms of social media, online reviews give you a chance to build a closer relationship with your customers. By closely monitoring and interacting with customer reviews, you get a better understanding of your business needs. As you reply to both positive and negative reviews, you are clearly showing that you have great interest in what customers have to say.
This is why as a business owner you need to engage early and often. By keeping a close eye on user online reviews about your business, and interacting properly with both positive and negative feedback; youâll create the right balance your potential customers need to see. Youâll also manage to rectify situations, build consumer trust, and keep your finger on the pulse of customer satisfaction.
 Managing such close interaction with current and potential customers is made easy with Bizioner. Bizioner gives you the edge of representing your business elegantly with a unique business profile. It also opens direct communication channels with your customers and prospects enabling you to respond to comments and reviews, message consumers, and post content on behalf of your business. Most importantly it gives you powerful tools to increase your customer base and even maintain loyal customers with a full dashboard of consumer activity and a smart mobile rewarding system âBizioner Customer Loyalty Programâ. Get in touch with the Bizioner team for more details on how you can subscribe to Bizioner business services.