72% of Buyers Trust Reviews as Much as Personal Recommendations and 70% of Customers Trust a Business with a Minimum of 6-10 Reviews
Google+ integration with Zagat helps you discover great places with reviews. Summaries of user reviews with a scoring system help you evaluate Food, Service, Decor and Price.
Yelp is an online urban city guide that helps people find places to eat, shop, drink, relax and play, based on the informed opinions of a vibrant and active community of locals.
Citysearch is an online city guide that provides information about businesses in the categories of dining, entertainment, retail, travel, and professional services in cities around the World.
The rewards of consumer feedback are significantly positive to all businesses. Applying reviews and feedback from customers will improve your company’s operations, rectify shortcomings, and provide insight for delivering outstanding products and customer service.
You need to know what consumers are thinking. Today more than ever before, it’s essential to pay attention to what customers are saying. Not requesting feedback directly, is a sure way to enable negative comments on the Internet. Instead of letting reviews take a back seat and negative comments to surface, act proactively by requesting them first.
Consumers usually try to behave rationally. They want to make objective decisions, but many factors interfere with this behavior. Problems occur because we have limited knowledge of information, and constrained memory of past lessons. These factors have created an environment where people have learned to rely on others to assist in decision making.
In that way, we expand our reliance on social networks in making choices. The Internet is boosting the volume of information readily available, but the human capacity for memory hasn’t changed. This means we will continue to increasingly look to others to help us make decisions.
At one time, people would pick a restaurant by peeking through the window. Now, diners can’t decide where to go without looking at their smart phones to search Yelp or Urbanspoon for online reviews. These reviews possess quite the influence, especially the negative ones.
According to a Lightspeed Research study, between one and three bad online reviews would be enough to deter the majority (67%) of shoppers from purchasing a product or service. Regardless of what market you operate in or how large your business is, reputation marketing will dramatically increase your brand’s online visibility.
This is where reputation marketing and online reviews provide the decisive factor. All things being equal, when your business has more positive reviews than its competitors, you will gain the perspective client. Moreover, positive reviews help improve your position with the search engines. Those businesses on Google Plus Local which have great reviews are more likely to appear top of search results.
Consumers are now conditioned to seek out information online. The key question is when the customer finds your company, do you have the positive reputation to influence their decision?
