How to Ask for a Review

Customer feedback has many layers of benefits. They can give you a more objective look into your own business, entice other people to buy products, or build up your brand’s reputation. In other words, customer feedback can become an extremely powerful source of revenue and optimization.

Unfortunately, no matter how good the customer experience is, many people will be pretty hesitant to leave online reviews. Usually, it’s nothing personal as writing online reviews takes quite a bit of time and thinking, so there’s a natural barrier for customers to work through.

Businesses are left with the option of either passively waiting and hoping for the best or learning how to request reviews from customers properly. Luckily, there are plenty of templates and best practices that help businesses collect customer feedback.

How to ask for a review systematically

One thing most people intuitively understand is that bombarding customers with requests to leave positive reviews can backfire. Not only may they leave no online reviews at all, but they may get annoyed enough to leave a negative one.

So, knowing how to ask for a review and, most importantly, when to ask for one can go a long way. Fortunately, according to consumer behavior research, 67% of customers leave a review when asked to do so.

A great rule of thumb is to ask whether you would be negatively impacting customer relationships when asking for a review. If it is ever the case, then that opportunity is not a great one. Other than that, there will be plenty of great cases when you can ask someone to write online reviews.

Send follow up emails

One of the best ways to request online reviews is to send an email some time after a user has purchased a product or service. Usually, businesses favor waiting somewhere between 2 weeks and 1 month to send a reminder email.

Sending out follow up emails within days or even faster will not provide the customer with enough time to actually test out the product or service. It may also make your business seem a little desperate for online reviews, which may affect the customer experience negatively in the long run.

Additionally, setting these emails up is extremely easy nowadays. There are tons of review request email template libraries that can be used as a source of inspiration. As most businesses use email marketing services anyway, tweaking a few review request templates and adding them into sequences takes barely any work and can be done without any additional costs.

Ask during a customer support case

Any point of interaction can be converted into positive review and customer support processes are no different. They do have drawbacks, however, so agents should be extra careful when asking for customer feedback on products and services.

One of the issues is that most customer support cases revolve around things that have made a customer unhappy. Asking someone to leave online reviews while they’re in a bad mood is a recipe for disaster.

There are still cases, however, when such a process can even lead to improved customer relationships. Good cases involve either when something has been resolved so well that the customer is elated with the results or when someone is just asking for help in using a specific product they have bought.

It should still be used somewhat sparingly as most businesses will also want to collect customer feedback on support processes. Asking someone to leave two or more reviews is pushing the envelope and may backfire.

Minimize the effort for the customer

Whether you choose to ask by tweaking a review request email template or some other method, one of the most important things is to simplify the process as much as possible for the customer. As mentioned previously, writing any sort of customer feedback is a taxing process, so if the interface and methodology is complicated, most people will simply click out.

As such, all feedback systems should at most take a couple of steps and have no or a very small minimum amount of characters. Additionally, some businesses opt to send in a basic template for the customer so that they only need to fill in their experience.

While the latter may not be applicable to all businesses, especially those who have a diverse range of products and services, you should always take a careful approach when designing the customer feedback system. Every additional step will knock off some percentage points from the likelihood of someone leaving a review.

Respond to every review

While responses shouldn’t contain any additional push to leave positive reviews, simply reacting to all feedback may have an enormous impact on results. Customers that see that the company cares about reviews and feedback may be more inclined to leave something themselves.

Additionally, some businesses, if the review platform allows, give out small gifts if someone leaves feedback. For example, that may be a personal discount code that’s sent over email, but the customer is informed through the feedback response.

Responses also have the benefit of not impacting the customer journey directly. All other methods slightly alter the course of the journey, which could have unexpected effects if done incorrectly.

Conclusion

Asking for reviews is a fairly straightforward process. There’s a few rules of thumb to go by that ensure overall success. All other tweaks and changes are small optimizations throughout the process that can slightly improve overall results.

Yet, the most important step is preparing a few points of interaction where you can ask customers to leave feedback. Implementing a quick and easy system for reviews can also be highly beneficial as customers will be much more likely to leave feedback if doesn’t seem burdensome.