Why are Customer Reviews Important for a Business?

Managing a shipping business properly and delivering packages in a timely fashion will always reflect well with your clients. Given how important web-based reviews and word of mouth have become in recent years, positive reviews and testimonials have also become crucial for success. Why are Customer Reviews Important for a Business?

Importance of Product and Delivery Reviews for your Business

According to Medium, 92% of B2B decision-makers are likely to purchase products after reading trusted reviews, with 27% citing it as a decisive factor. Data by Small Biz Trends indicated that only 48% of people would consider using a business with less than 4 stars. Also, 73% only paid attention to reviews written in the last month, making a constant influx of reviews a must for business’ credibility. 

What is the inherent value of capturing the voice of the customer and having client reviews posted on your website, Google Business or social media pages? How can you encourage clients to leave more reviews while also keeping them positive in order to generate even more leads going forward?

Benefits of Having Product and Delivery Reviews

How do social media reviews for product and delivery correlate with your business’ reputation? People like to believe other people when it comes to recommendations of businesses to trust, especially when it comes to companies in the shipping industry. Judging by Finances Online, 10-30% of all submitted reviews are fakes, with 85% of people completely disregarding reviews which are older than 3 months. Building trust with your clients is a long-term project, one which will require you to operate by your business’ values in providing professional shipping services.

The upside of having product and delivery reviews that accurately reflect your business conduct will manifest in several essential ways going forward:

• Higher confidence of cold leads in your shipping services
• Stimulation for existing leads to reach out for more services
• Dramatic improvement of your business’ SEO ranking
• Improved credibility of the businesses you ship for, improving your B2B relations in return
• Ability to use submitted reviews as marketing materials through digital and printed channels
• Ability to quickly react to problems in your shipping process management

Quantity VS Quality of Product and Delivery Reviews

There is a discussion to be made on whether you should emphasize having more reviews of mediocre quality or fewer of higher quality business reviews. Take a look at any application on Google or iOS store and you will see that many reviews don’t say anything concrete about the product. 

However, eCommerce platforms such as Amazon do have checks in place to ensure bots and scammers cannot leave unverified reviews on individual products. In terms of reviews for a shipping business, you should create a platform for clients to write more structured reviews. 

You can break down your service into several 1-10 questions and leave a general section open for freeform writing through a platform like Google Forms. Don’t try to generate as many reviews for your business as quickly as possible – play the long game and create a platform for structured reviews.

Streamlining the Review Process for Higher Engagement

How can you both gather product and delivery reviews while also not intruding on your clients’ time or patience? Ensure your review process is designed to engage with customers. Making your review surveys too simple will inherently communicate that you are very lenient about the reviews you gather. Too many questions, and your clients are likely to either forgo writing the review or write mediocre responses to your queries. It is good to have a helpful site for writing assistance handy in order to edit and format your questions into a legible form.

Here are several things that you can try to make your review process smoother:

• Keep your questions short and focused on the shipping process
• Create a balance of multiple-choice and freeform questions
• Avoid double-meaning and confusing wording – clean up your writing
• Don’t make all of your questions mandatory – give your client agency
• Test and reedit your review process before fully implementing it

Managing Product and Delivery Reviews

Once reviews start pouring in, you should keep an eye out for promoters and detractors to determine how well your clients are accepting the process. Simply generating new reviews without monitoring or moderating them will only do your shipping business so much good. It is important to stay relevant to your customers online by using the customer feedback you are collecting.

You should keep an eye out for new reviews constantly and review them yourself for useful data, feedback and shipping discrepancies. Try to spot patterns among your reviews in regards to the quality of your service and opportunities to improve the shipping and handling of products. It’s also equally important to publicly respond to select reviews, especially those with a negative connotation toward your business. 

Make it clear that you are ready and willing to work with your clients on improving your shipping and delivery services. Make sure to always be professional and pro-consumer in your responses however – as the saying goes “the customer is always right”, so never be negative. Managing incoming reviews correctly will mitigate any existing negativity and ensure that future clients are more inclined to reach out to you for shipping services.

Timing your Review Requests Properly

The question of when you should request a review from one of your clients is a tricky one. After all, a shipping company’s service is finished only once a product is safely delivered and undamaged during the process. Requesting a review from one of your clients at any point before they have successfully shipped or received their products will end in failure. Clients will be forced to write a review based on a partial experience or, simply opt out of writing the review altogether. 

Instead, you can automate the review request to be sent to your clients’ email addresses in two-to-three weeks once the order has been made. For international shipments, you can extend that window even further due to local customs processing. Reaching out to your clients with review and survey prompts post-engagement is an important part of customer’s experience for your business. It will showcase that you are interested in the safety of their orders and their satisfaction with your services, prompting them to leave good reviews.

Improving your Shipping Business through Client Feedback

While the main purpose of gathering positive reviews for your business is to signal to cold leads that you are reliable, that’s not all you can use customer feedback for. You should always analyze the reviews clients leave in order to find obscure bottlenecks in your workflow and mitigate them quickly. Some clients will pass on reaching out to you privately about a problem they’ve had with your shipping service and opt to publicly comment instead. 

These reviews, while negative at first glance, can be extremely helpful in improving your shipping business. Discern the reviews people leave about your company and see what you can do about improving your services one step at a time. There’s no better way to show how committed you are to pro-consumer relations than to act on client feedback in the reviews they wrote.

Customer Reviews are Important for a Business

No amount of marketing content or SEO keywords will ever replace client reviews in terms of publicity. Make sure that you create a platform for people to easily and quickly write reviews about your services to encourage more engagement in the future. Avoid paying for reviews and generating fake ones to maintain a professional brand image and give your clients time to come around and write reviews. While it will take time for your review system to bear fruit, once it does, your shipping business’ integrity will improve considerably compared to before.

Bio: Kristin Savage is a freelance writer and blogger at https://subjecto.com/. Her main target audiences are college students and young professionals. She covers topics related to college life, academic success, and starting a career. She always provides her readers with actionable tips they can easily apply to solve their dilemmas and problems.